"Apologies to all impacted by this transient configuration. Firefox 43 users who do not have h.264 will get 360p VP8 until the configuration is updated early next year. The very large majority of Firefox users watching YouTube have h.264. For them, and for user who get VP9, <video> MSE performs better overall than Flash."
> "Unfortunately this is not an acceptable state for us. We have many millions of users whose Youtube experience suddenly got significantly degraded, and we're not willing to leave them in that state over the holidays. Any chance you guys could simply roll back the change you guys made? If not, we're forced to ship a Firefox update that lies to you guys about the Firefox version, which really is not a good option for either of us :("
Firefox users without H.264 platform codecs were affected: 100% of Windows XP users (which are about 14% of all Firefox users worldwide!), 2% of all other Windows users (the "N" and "KN" editions in Europe and South Korea), and 3% of Linux users.
OpenH264 can't be used for video decoding because it can't decode the H264 profiles used to encode video on the internet; it's strictly baseline profile only which is pretty useless. The only reason it exists is because Cisco has a bunch of H264-only videoconferencing hardware that they want to be able to work with WebRTC.
I got this shit, just like I get no ability to change any search settings or do an advanced Google search on Firefox mobile, and am now spoofing Chrome as useragent.
In my opinion, Firefox should do what Chrome did, and append the competing browser’s UA to their own useragent.
For me, the extreme Youtube slowdown coincided with me being in a new location. For a while, I just thought that the internet must be extremely slow, and yet, the pages themselves loaded fast, fps games worked smoothly, and there weren't any other signs that videos should buffer extremely slowly. Now I know why.
"Apologies to all impacted by this transient configuration. Firefox 43 users who do not have h.264 will get 360p VP8 until the configuration is updated early next year. The very large majority of Firefox users watching YouTube have h.264. For them, and for user who get VP9, <video> MSE performs better overall than Flash."