Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge
Users on Reddit and Hacker News are complaining that YouTube seems to have inserted an intentional five-second delay before video pages will load in Mozilla’s Firefox and occasionally some other browsers. YouTube tells The Verge that these users are right about the delay, but the browser has nothing to do with it — it’s part of the company’s efforts to quash ad blockers across all platforms.
“In the past week, users using ad blockers may have experienced suboptimal viewing, which included delays in loading, regardless of the browser they are using,” YouTube communications manager Christopher Lawton wrote in an email. Lawton wrote that disabling the ad blocker should resolve the issue, though users “may still experience a temporary delay…