YouTube says it doesn’t slow down Firefox, only ad blockers

users on Reddit And Pirate News They complain that YouTube has introduced a deliberate five-second delay before video pages load in Mozilla’s Firefox and sometimes some other browsers. YouTube says the edge Those users are right about the delay, but the browser has nothing to do with it — it’s part of the company’s effort to eliminate ad blockers across all platforms.

“In the past week, users using ad blockers may have experienced a suboptimal viewing experience, including loading delays, regardless of the browser they are using,” YouTube communications director Christopher Lawton wrote in an email. Disabling the ad blocker should solve the problem, although users “may still experience a temporary loading delay” until they update their browser, Lawton wrote.

Lawton also said that users will continue to see issues like this as YouTube’s ad blocker detection methods improve.

The issue was initially reported as targeting Firefox users, but users online said they were seeing the delay in Chrome and Edge as well. Reddit and Hacker News users who examined the code that appeared to be causing the delay said they saw no indication that YouTube was checking the type of browser being used. Damiano DeMonte, senior brand manager at Mozilla, wrote in an email to: the edge “There is no evidence that this is a Firefox-specific problem.”

The five-second delay does not affect everyone. A few of us are in the edge I tried to reproduce the problem, on both Mac and Windows computers. But whether signed in to YouTube or not, using an ad blocker or not, or in incognito mode or not, none of us noticed the reported lag.

Google has been making big strides on the ad blocking front recently, and much of the momentum in that effort has been seen on YouTube, which began disabling videos for some viewers with ad blockers in June. YouTube confirmed last month that it had “launched a global effort” to get users to either enable ads or subscribe to the $13.99-per-month ad-free premium service. Lawton described advertising as “a vital lifeline for our creators.”

Last week, Google detailed a major change to Chrome that undermines uBlock Origin, one of the most popular ad blocking extensions. Independent developers have been in an arms race with big companies that want to show ads for as long as there have been ads on the Internet — and right now, it looks like Google is serious about fighting back.