EDIT: It’s something to do with my VPN and/or EasyTether, but it only happens in Firefox, so I didn’t think that could be it. I commented about my findings below: https://lemmy.world/comment/7585497

I start a video and it either doesn’t load at all of stalls within 5 seconds, never to recover.

I’ve tried everything:

  • Deleting every Mozilla folder in AppData to completely refresh Firefox. (after backing up my profile)
  • Flushing DNS cache
  • Uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox. (Which made me remember I had a policies.json file in the program folder to permanently lockdown the settings I want. So that wasn’t the problem either.)

Even when using no extensions like an ad blockers it still won’t play videos. Besides, I’m a Premium subscriber. Once in a while a video will work, but it’s so, so rare. And often it’ll even stop after a minute.

Meanwhile, it’ll work in the DuckDuckGo Browser all the time, which is Chromium based.

What do you think the deal is? It broke rather suddenly a few weeks ago. Do you think it’s Mozilla’s fault, or Google’s?

  • @[email protected]English
    4•9 months ago

    Try looking in the network panel to see if any resources are failing to load? Any chance FF sync is installing extensions that are interfering?

    • @CrayonRosaryOP
      2•9 months ago

      Thank you for reminding me of that. Yes, I’m getting a bunch of NS_BINDING_ABORTED errors on about 1/3 to 1/2 of the requests to googlevideo.com.

      From what I can tell, it’s an error you get when a javascript binding is deleted because you navigated away from a page before the event finished. This happens continuously, and the duration of these requests is 0 ms. Seems like it’s related to DASH video and how a lot of little requests are used to download small segments of video.

      I’ve done some experimenting, and I think it’s the fault of my VPN and how I get internet on my PC. I use EasyTether to get internet through my phone without paying for tethering, and Mullvad VPN. I use the VPN on my phone, so that my carrier doesn’t see my PC traffic nor my phone traffic.

      Ironically, YouTube works if I use the VPN on my PC instead, or if I run it on both! No idea why it’s acting strangely, and why it only causes issues in Firefox.