YouTube forces Firefox users to wait

Mozilla Firefox users have started reporting a strange issue. When they open a video, a blank page first appears for five seconds, before the video starts as normal Robot body. The issue can also occur in Microsoft Edge, but is effectively remedied by switching to Google Chrome.

Reddit account u/vk6_ was one of the first to report the five-second delay, which appeared in a video How the delay is not due to any glitch in Firefox itself. Change the user agent to Chrome so YouTube thinks you are connected to a Chrome browser and the video loads without delay.

Other users found a piece of JavaScript code that adds the delay, doing nothing but waiting five seconds before moving forward. However, no evidence was found that the code somehow doesn’t work on Chrome. In its response to Android Authority, YouTube denies that the delay targets any specific browser, suggesting it is part of the company’s new anti-ad features.

The Android Authority also wrote that the delay has not been triggered for all users, and so far it has not been possible to determine the parameters behind whether a particular user has been affected or not. For example, uninstalling all browser extensions will not help. The only thing that seems certain is that Chrome is the only browser that is not affected at all.