If the video is encoded using a codec your hardware doesn't handle, it would be left up to the CPU to decode. Av1 can slow everything down to a crawl over CPU. You'd think the browser would be smart about the stream selection though.
That's intentional on YouTubes end, they aim to serve more bitrate-efficient codecs wherever possible, even if it's a high burden on the client due to a lack of hardware acceleration. They'll only fall back to older codecs if the client is completely incapable of handling the modern ones. It's annoying but at their scale it no doubt saves them a shitload of bandwidth.
It also encourages users to upgrade to newer hardware since older devices are known to get slower as they age due to software increasing complexity and hardware mitigations (yes, they are also for phones). Most users will just blame the device.
Not saying that is the cause of this slow down, but since the mpeg4 patents don't expire till 2027(?) (and one of those patents prevents hardware decode on Linux) we as a society have given Google every incentive to do this and I welcome them to make mpeg4 irrelevant.
I believe Youtube's player is driving codec selection, not the browser (i.e. the player requests a list of supported codecs and then picks the one most beneficial for Google, not the other way around).
That said, I've solved this problem for myself on macOS and Firefox by setting media.webrtc.codec.video.av1.enabled to false on about:config, as all other codecs used by Youtube are hardware accelerated on my Mac.
> I believe Youtube's player is driving codec selection, not the browser (i.e. the player requests a list of supported codecs and then picks the one most beneficial for Google, not the other way around).
The way the browser can still participate in choosing is by e.g. not listing AV1 as supported when there is no hardware decoder on the local system. Both Safari and Edge took (approximately) that style of approach, but it comes with the downside that if the server only has AV1 video then the client gets nothing.
Practically, that downside isn't a big deal until codec support is high enough sites start assuming the codec is just supported and they don't need to host alternative options.
Yes, I think Safari even did so dynamically based on the mac being plugged into external power or not for a while, which I think is a nice compromise.
Apparently, there's even an API attribute that indicates whether a given codec is power efficient (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MediaCapabi...), which Google must also be ignoring – not their problem, after all. (I wonder if anybody did the math of the opportunity cost of losing a few ad impressions due to the user's battery dying early vs. the incremental bandwidth cost?)
I run an extension that allows to automatically request h.264 streams from YouTube even when av1 is also available. Saves a lot of CPU, at the cost of some bandwidth.
It’s funny that this kind of browser extension has recurred over the years. Originally it was to replace the awful CPU hog flash player with an HTML5 h.264 player[1], then it was to sidestep YouTube’s insistence on VP* codecs, and now it’s to sidestep AV1.
In a beautiful world, there would be a link to each codec to let the user decide, or the browser itself would override the web site's preference and provide such links. It's sad that we keep having to resort to browser extensions to circumvent terrible web site and browser software.
Assuming you have hardware support for VP9 as well, setting media.webrtc.codec.video.av1.enabled to false on about:config achieves the same outcome without an extension.
Yep, that's what I use. It took youtube from using 100% cpu, to the point where my little xps13 was thermal throttling, to 50% cpu running 1080p at 2-3x speed.
I looked now and noticed that I actually reject VP8 and VP9 and accept AV1. I run Linux on a Ryzen 4750U, for the record. It did not have trouble chewing through VP8 / VP9 without skipping frames, but it ran unpleasantly hot.
Youtube has been turning on AV1 for 1080p content for me. My phone is the only device with an AV1 hardware decoder. The impact on battery life and CPU usage has been extreme.
You can tell Youtube to prefer AV1 only for low-quality videos (https://www.youtube.com/account_playback) or you can install an extension that will force h264 playback where supported.
Other playback features such as ambient mode and volume equalisation can also impact performance, though that kind of depends on how fast your web browser is at executing Javascript, and to a much smaller extent.
The substantial bandwidth savings are here to stay, though, so in time I think Youtube will move to AV1 more often.
For devices with the hardware decoder it'll be in the same ballpark as before. For devices without the hardware decoder the CPU will use significantly more power to decode the video than a hardware decoder would.
This memory leak happens very often to me in GitHub, not sure why, and not sure if it's Microsoft's fault, or Firefox's. I actually have no idea at all on how to debug this...
Firefox Console > Memory > Enable record call stacks, reload the page, take a snapshot, wait until you notice memory grows, take another snapshot. Then compare the two: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools-user/memory.... You can also try a performance recording.
But you probably won't be able to make much sense of the results without a lot of effort because of all the minimization/obfuscation.
Tangially related; imgur uses (and used) 100% CPU for me; I was never quite sure how or why.
The reason I bring it up is because I tried to actually profile it a handful of times, but my C++/Rust/Python knowledge was completely useless in the face of a browser development toolchain.
Did I miss something, or is it not possible to easily see what functions take the meat of javascript execution time?
(it feels really absurd if it's not easy, given that people can essentially serve whatever arbitrary script they want and my computer pretty much has to deal with it if I want to use whatever site)
If someone sees, oh YouTube is making my computer hot, the last thing that's going to occur to them is, "wait let me try turning off my adblocker."
When corporations try to change people's incentives, they are obvious about it, so people know what to change.
In contrast, changing CPU usage on video playback for people who use adblockers and then not telling anyone is... just not a strategy that makes any sense at all.
I find it fascinating that people think 12 seconds armchair psychology is enough to definitively rule out phenomena that hinge on complex tech and complex human deliberations about policy. That works on campy monster of the week TV shows but it catastrophically underestimates real world complexity.
We've got documented cases in the wild of youtube adding 5 second timer, as well as experimenting with 3 video limits for adblock users, not to mention the cat and mouse game of breaking scraper-oriented tools like Newpipe. So it's happened before, and on-the-ground evidence of historical precedent and a straight look at incentives tell us more than assumed psychological states.
Did you mean to reply to a different comment? Mine didn't say anything about psychology.
But you do seem to be strengthening my comment -- when YouTube was implementing a 3 video limit for users blocking ads, they were doing so with a big huge message: "It looks like you may be using an ad blocker. Video playback will be blocked unless YouTube is allowlisted or the ad blocker is disabled."
That makes sense as a strategy, telling the user what to change. Silently using up more CPU doesn't.
Musing on how a message will be subjectively experienced by users to the point of ruling out explanations based on an assumed subjective reaction, and assuming complex software development outcomes are tied to that specific strategy, is in fact about psychology on multiple levels, despite your protestation to the contrary. Specifically it's armchair psychology that underestimates complexity.
Most of my examples cut against your interpretation rather than in favor of. The 5 second delay was discovered rather than announced, and same with Newpipe breaking, and I don't even agree that the video message had anything to do with a broad principle of always tying communications to user experience. If anything the history is the opposite, rotating through various forms of obstruction all of which nudge user behavior in various ways, perfectly agnostic to any principle of how it gets communicated.
It's pretty common sense to say that YouTube CPU usage will not be linked to adblocking for most people. Any more than a sunny day is linked to what you ate for dinner last night.
It's not psychology. It's just straightforward common sense.
You seem to be trying to obfuscate something here that is really quite simple.
Incompetence is by definition not intentional, and sabotage is the action of a rogue employee, not corporate strategy. A corporation can't intentionally sabotage itself, by definition.
I don't think that has any connection to the subject under discussion, which is about whether YouTube CPU performance would lead people to turn off adblockers. Not about getting people to switch to Chrome.
I work for another large streaming site where people like to use adblockers. These adblockers also cause similar performance issues that are entirely caused by awful code in these blockers. I've studied the code for all of these blockers and they do stuff like:
- Constantly hammering the playlist endpoint to try and get something without an ad stitched in
- Constantly tearing down and remaking the player
- During an ad, requesting the playlist for every other quality to see if those do not have any stitched ads
- Proxying all traffic to servers the adblocker people own in countries where ads are not typically served (eg Russia)
- Intercepting playlist requests and simply deleting segments that they believe are ads (oh no why is my stream broken!!! stupid streaming website!!)
Youtube _could_ be doing something here, but there is also a very real chance your adblocker code is simply bad.
None of what you're mentioning applies to uBlock interacting with YouTube, I suspect you're talking about Twitch, which bakes the ad breaks into the stream so you still get the stream interrupted even you manage to block the ads, making people resort to hacky things like using the homepage player when an ad would be played.
Possibly You are conflating CPU usage with halting of video for length of the ad? ad blocker halts the video i.e.spinner widget appears for length of the ad.
Sorry, but drive-by philosophy is not applicable here.
YouTube developers single out adblocker users and taunt them with an "Experiencing interruptions" toast prompt that locks the video stream for ~5 seconds. Curiously, it contains a link to the YouTube Help Center, to the section fragment "#check_ad_blockers". In other words: "yeah, we know you've got uBlock Origin enabled, enjoy the speedbump".
Player base.js:
api.XL("innertubeCommand",{openPopupAction:{popup:{notificationActionRenderer:{responseText:{runs:[{text:"Experiencing interruptions?"}]},actionButton:{buttonRenderer:{style:"STYLE_OVERLAY",size:"SIZE_DEFAULT", text:{runs:[{text:"Find out why"}]},navigationEndpoint:{commandMetadata:{webCommandMetadata:{url:"https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3037019#check_ad_blockers
So that's what it is! I've never seen the toast message, but I had a suspicion it was intentional on YouTube's side considering it doesn't occur in Chrome. Sadly I don't see a work-around in that reddit thread. I wonder if someone has a violentmonkey script for it.
Google does - Google search and maps have gotten objectively worse over the past 2 years. At least in Canada.
I have 38 locations in my (huge) city saved in Google maps and it breaks when I ask it to find a way from point A to point B. Works fine when logged out.
Maps also put traffic signals where there are none, and while finding shortest path it stopped putting weights to traffic signals. So you could have it route you via a city's main street instead of the freeway because it's 2km shorter but it ignores the 9 traffic signals that wastes 15 mins. Apple maps works fine.
Google search on web has adopted bad UX, and clicking a map or a shopping item has a noticeable delay between. Also right click "Open in new tab" options are gone.
Are you saying all these "enshittification" changes are deliberate?
Worth checking the browser console. If you use a content blocker (e.g. uBlock Origin) it may block things the site really, really "wants". It then goes into an extreme busy loop and throws exceptions to the console like a berserker on a nightly rampage.
Once you carefully whitelist the resource it wants the CPU usage goes down again. At least that fixed it for me (I was mistakenly checking various codec related settings in Firefox first too to find a solution.)
Somewhat relevant: can somebody share good mpv defaults (or some other interesting technique) for playing YT videos? I have managed to get it to work, but it still pauses a lot for bufferring. I wonder if there's maybe some yt-dlp, ffmpeg, etc. trick to pre-cache some segments or something like that. The reason to play it in mpv is not to avoid commercials (I have a paid account), but because I can then play it from my editor while fully controlling the playback - it works great for watching lectures and taking notes.
As others have noted, if you don't have hardware decoding for the codec being used, it will suck up a huge amount of cpu. Last year I got a new Macbook Pro with M3 Pro cpu, and it's amazing how little cpu it uses for video playback. After watching an hour of Youtube, the battery is down only about 5 or 10%.
I have weird issues with YouTube on my home PC. If I have a Chrome window with a YouTube video running to the side of my monitor, it always inevitably ends up freezing up the whole display. Ctrl+Alt+Delete and cancelling back in makes it go away briefly, however sometimes it can just keep freezing the monitor up constantly.
The weird thing is, the PC (running Windows 11) has a powerful graphics card which can handle AAA games (as of earlier this year at least), graphics drivers are all up to date, and YouTube works fine in fullscreen across the whole ultra-wide monitor.
I just can't work out what's causing it. It makes running YouTube side-by-side with other programs a real pain in the ass. It's been like this for months now. Checked browser HWA settings, and they're all as they should be.
Do you have an iGPU+dGPU combo like in a gaming laptop? For my 2019 gaming laptop with a i915+RTX2060, if I leave the switchable option on in the hardware settings (meaning the OS can choose which GPU to use ie. iGPU for low power), I end up with similar behavior in Linux/Win10. The external port actually uses the dGPU so rendering must go through it but it will struggle with the switchable option and I end up with freezing or stutters. In Linux, I explicitly configure Xorg to only use the iGPU and reserve the dGPU for model inference which fixes the stuttering issue. When booting into Win10, I explicitly disable the iGPU and turn off the external monitor so my VR playing doesn't stutter or youtube doesn't freeze or stutter.
Have only noticed this on my Windows machine, not any of my Macs. The windows machine has enough horsepower to use most of it's 2000w power supply, so I don't think it's a hardware issue. Using firefox engine & an adblocker fwiw.
Does your PC have hardware-accelerated AV1 video decoding enabled in Firefox? And does your Mac? (you can check in about:support)
My PC plays videos just fine, but it started sucking down 50W more than it used to, and AV1 was the culprit. Now that I've switched YT back to hardware-accelerated h264 playback, everything is back to normal.
Also: Recently my videos "goes full black" for few milliseconds (not matter which way to see them, but yt is where I noted it more). I'm on M3, and can't pin point a reason.
Edge has been freezing on me for months with over 100% CPU usage. I finally figured out it was a youtube downloader extension. I disabled it and the problem went away.
Also had some funky stuff with ambient mode. The whole page renders, video and audio plays, but nothing is interactive. Can't push buttons, can't select text etc etc. Like it renders the page to a png and shows it.
Hell, I have to use my phone instead if I want to go to any of those pages nowadays. And even my phone now gets a random crash from chrome or the page itself.
I wonder if it’s proof of work bullshit. For those to be effective, they have to slow down whatever machine is running in an LLM farm.
That generally means they have to peg a desktop GPU for long enough to make a dent larger than LLM inference time.
Browsing with a 2 core box is like using a musket to blow a hole in a wall that’s optimized for armor piercing rounds.
Is this dumb? Of course. Your best recourse is probably to work around the anti-LLM blocks by having an agent read and summarize the page for you.
Are there any decent cloud based web renderers yet? Something like vnc or rdp backed by a shared 4090 could solve the problem. For static content, it’d only have to run proof of work once, then serve the result from cache.
That makes no sense. You require PoW before providing the information, not when the page is already sent. For a large code repository like GitHub for LLM training, it's also trivial to just git fetch to scrape. The simpler explanation is that modern web devs are frequently incompetent and can't get static text to appear on an idle page without pegging cores, can't get subsecond server page generation for simple CRUD, etc. This was the trend before LLMs were ever a thing.
I absolutely despise what they did to GitHub's website. It used to be smooth and slick. But now a lot of things like reviewing PRs or just searching through a repo are painfully slow.
I've had something similar happen starting maybe a year ago, and varying in intensity from "no problem" up to "pegged CPU in the youtube tab and UI actions can lag up to several seconds". It doesn't affect video playback though.
This behavior comes and goes over time, for example it's been fine for several weeks in a row now. I assume it's punishment for running an ad-blocker.
No other context, huh? Not even browser and OS? If youtube itself was stuttering, 100M daily users would flip out. So narrow it down. For example if you add the word Edge to your search you might find settings like Video SuperResolution that can tax your CPU https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1bcmmdo/micr...
This started happening on one of my older computers recently and I had to actually disable hardware acceleration to get the audio to stop being out of sync. The tradeoff for that has been noticeable frame dropping. I even added an extension to force h264 but there's no difference.
It can play video no problem on other sites or in VLC. It's just YouTube and just on that PC...That PC can run Doom Eternal. Video content shouldn't be a problem.
Many youtube videos consist of silent video streams combined with separate audio streams. Youtube-dl can list them. Often, the lower-quality and some medium-quality video stream will also contain audio, but the higher-quality videos are often silent with a second audio stream mixed in.
I can imagine that your older computer might have native support for decoding the high-res h264 video, but not for the high-quality OPUS audio stream, causing them to decode at different speeds.
I don't think there's a solution to that problem that doesn't involve running a dedicated video player such as VLC.
That said, I've also heard a lot of complaints from people still using Adblock Plus. I don't know what rules ABP has implemented, but they seem to affect Youtube performance much worse than uBlock whenever Youtube changes something.
Given their actions the last two years or so unfortunately the default assumption is (reasonably) “probably something intentional to get people to stop doing something they don’t want, like using ad blockers.”
Very well could be. But with companies like Google I immediately start from a place of light-cynicism until I see evidence to the contrary at this point. I haven't given them the benefit of the doubt in probably a decade, and generally it's a fair way to go about things.
It's probably the special Google hardware obsoleting sauce called AV1. Without hardware acceleration your computer will struggle to decode their videos.
I keep getting the video restarting after a few seconds randomly, very annoying even more so when it's the ad that restarts from the beginning, which almost seems intentional. Like a bug that nobody is in a hurry to fix.
Not saying that is the cause of this slow down, but since the mpeg4 patents don't expire till 2027(?) (and one of those patents prevents hardware decode on Linux) we as a society have given Google every incentive to do this and I welcome them to make mpeg4 irrelevant.
That said, I've solved this problem for myself on macOS and Firefox by setting media.webrtc.codec.video.av1.enabled to false on about:config, as all other codecs used by Youtube are hardware accelerated on my Mac.
The way the browser can still participate in choosing is by e.g. not listing AV1 as supported when there is no hardware decoder on the local system. Both Safari and Edge took (approximately) that style of approach, but it comes with the downside that if the server only has AV1 video then the client gets nothing.
Practically, that downside isn't a big deal until codec support is high enough sites start assuming the codec is just supported and they don't need to host alternative options.
Apparently, there's even an API attribute that indicates whether a given codec is power efficient (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MediaCapabi...), which Google must also be ignoring – not their problem, after all. (I wonder if anybody did the math of the opportunity cost of losing a few ad impressions due to the user's battery dying early vs. the incremental bandwidth cost?)
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20110302145602/http://www.vertic...
Which is almost what AV1 is, native hardware decoding is slowly slowly progressing
I recall h264ify but not sure about it
I looked now and noticed that I actually reject VP8 and VP9 and accept AV1. I run Linux on a Ryzen 4750U, for the record. It did not have trouble chewing through VP8 / VP9 without skipping frames, but it ran unpleasantly hot.
You can tell Youtube to prefer AV1 only for low-quality videos (https://www.youtube.com/account_playback) or you can install an extension that will force h264 playback where supported.
Other playback features such as ambient mode and volume equalisation can also impact performance, though that kind of depends on how fast your web browser is at executing Javascript, and to a much smaller extent.
The substantial bandwidth savings are here to stay, though, so in time I think Youtube will move to AV1 more often.
What option are you referring to here? I don’t see anything that seems related to that.
Well, is it higher or lower?
But you probably won't be able to make much sense of the results without a lot of effort because of all the minimization/obfuscation.
The reason I bring it up is because I tried to actually profile it a handful of times, but my C++/Rust/Python knowledge was completely useless in the face of a browser development toolchain.
Did I miss something, or is it not possible to easily see what functions take the meat of javascript execution time?
(it feels really absurd if it's not easy, given that people can essentially serve whatever arbitrary script they want and my computer pretty much has to deal with it if I want to use whatever site)
I'll just leave it like this (480s of samples..?): https://imgur.com/a/IgaHOdX and come back in a few hours.
If someone sees, oh YouTube is making my computer hot, the last thing that's going to occur to them is, "wait let me try turning off my adblocker."
When corporations try to change people's incentives, they are obvious about it, so people know what to change.
In contrast, changing CPU usage on video playback for people who use adblockers and then not telling anyone is... just not a strategy that makes any sense at all.
We've got documented cases in the wild of youtube adding 5 second timer, as well as experimenting with 3 video limits for adblock users, not to mention the cat and mouse game of breaking scraper-oriented tools like Newpipe. So it's happened before, and on-the-ground evidence of historical precedent and a straight look at incentives tell us more than assumed psychological states.
But you do seem to be strengthening my comment -- when YouTube was implementing a 3 video limit for users blocking ads, they were doing so with a big huge message: "It looks like you may be using an ad blocker. Video playback will be blocked unless YouTube is allowlisted or the ad blocker is disabled."
That makes sense as a strategy, telling the user what to change. Silently using up more CPU doesn't.
Most of my examples cut against your interpretation rather than in favor of. The 5 second delay was discovered rather than announced, and same with Newpipe breaking, and I don't even agree that the video message had anything to do with a broad principle of always tying communications to user experience. If anything the history is the opposite, rotating through various forms of obstruction all of which nudge user behavior in various ways, perfectly agnostic to any principle of how it gets communicated.
It's pretty common sense to say that YouTube CPU usage will not be linked to adblocking for most people. Any more than a sunny day is linked to what you ate for dinner last night.
It's not psychology. It's just straightforward common sense.
You seem to be trying to obfuscate something here that is really quite simple.
Is it incompetence or sabotage? Who knows. The first rule of sabotage is to be indistinguishable from incompetence.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26184
- Constantly hammering the playlist endpoint to try and get something without an ad stitched in
- Constantly tearing down and remaking the player
- During an ad, requesting the playlist for every other quality to see if those do not have any stitched ads
- Proxying all traffic to servers the adblocker people own in countries where ads are not typically served (eg Russia)
- Intercepting playlist requests and simply deleting segments that they believe are ads (oh no why is my stream broken!!! stupid streaming website!!)
Youtube _could_ be doing something here, but there is also a very real chance your adblocker code is simply bad.
Sorry, but drive-by philosophy is not applicable here.
YouTube developers single out adblocker users and taunt them with an "Experiencing interruptions" toast prompt that locks the video stream for ~5 seconds. Curiously, it contains a link to the YouTube Help Center, to the section fragment "#check_ad_blockers". In other words: "yeah, we know you've got uBlock Origin enabled, enjoy the speedbump".
Player base.js:
User reports: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1la6tkm/anybody_no...I have 38 locations in my (huge) city saved in Google maps and it breaks when I ask it to find a way from point A to point B. Works fine when logged out.
Maps also put traffic signals where there are none, and while finding shortest path it stopped putting weights to traffic signals. So you could have it route you via a city's main street instead of the freeway because it's 2km shorter but it ignores the 9 traffic signals that wastes 15 mins. Apple maps works fine.
Google search on web has adopted bad UX, and clicking a map or a shopping item has a noticeable delay between. Also right click "Open in new tab" options are gone.
Are you saying all these "enshittification" changes are deliberate?
Once you carefully whitelist the resource it wants the CPU usage goes down again. At least that fixed it for me (I was mistakenly checking various codec related settings in Firefox first too to find a solution.)
https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular
it also integrates SponsorBlock!
I have weird issues with YouTube on my home PC. If I have a Chrome window with a YouTube video running to the side of my monitor, it always inevitably ends up freezing up the whole display. Ctrl+Alt+Delete and cancelling back in makes it go away briefly, however sometimes it can just keep freezing the monitor up constantly.
The weird thing is, the PC (running Windows 11) has a powerful graphics card which can handle AAA games (as of earlier this year at least), graphics drivers are all up to date, and YouTube works fine in fullscreen across the whole ultra-wide monitor.
I just can't work out what's causing it. It makes running YouTube side-by-side with other programs a real pain in the ass. It's been like this for months now. Checked browser HWA settings, and they're all as they should be.
For desktop, the extension HyperChat was made to address whatever programming is leading the livechat system to blowing up your CPU.
https://livetl.app/hyperchat
My PC plays videos just fine, but it started sucking down 50W more than it used to, and AV1 was the culprit. Now that I've switched YT back to hardware-accelerated h264 playback, everything is back to normal.
Might be YT, all along.
That generally means they have to peg a desktop GPU for long enough to make a dent larger than LLM inference time.
Browsing with a 2 core box is like using a musket to blow a hole in a wall that’s optimized for armor piercing rounds.
Is this dumb? Of course. Your best recourse is probably to work around the anti-LLM blocks by having an agent read and summarize the page for you.
Are there any decent cloud based web renderers yet? Something like vnc or rdp backed by a shared 4090 could solve the problem. For static content, it’d only have to run proof of work once, then serve the result from cache.
This behavior comes and goes over time, for example it's been fine for several weeks in a row now. I assume it's punishment for running an ad-blocker.
It can use a ridiculous amount of CPU.
It seems hardware accelerated only on windows chrome.
It can play video no problem on other sites or in VLC. It's just YouTube and just on that PC...That PC can run Doom Eternal. Video content shouldn't be a problem.
I can imagine that your older computer might have native support for decoding the high-res h264 video, but not for the high-quality OPUS audio stream, causing them to decode at different speeds.
I don't think there's a solution to that problem that doesn't involve running a dedicated video player such as VLC.
That said, I've also heard a lot of complaints from people still using Adblock Plus. I don't know what rules ABP has implemented, but they seem to affect Youtube performance much worse than uBlock whenever Youtube changes something.
I thought it was Firefox going bananas after some update, but I’m glad to find out it’s just another user hostile ploy from the owning class