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A suspected YouTube interface bug spikes RAM usage above 7 gigabytes, users report severe lag and frozen tabs — bug might be trapping browsers in an endless layout loop
Sahwa
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Lemme guess: it works perfectly fine in chrome. Google has been using this sort of anticompetitive tactic for years to wage war against other browsers.
Yes. I regularly have to either close Firefox or kill the GPU process in it so it’ll free up RAM. Worst I saw it was at 13GB.
ChozoUnpopular opinion: If it works in the engine that 70+% of devices are using, then it works. If it doesn’t work in your non-Chrome browser, then your browser is what’s broken.
DacoTacoNot also unpopular, but also wrong.
Often times firefox is following the css specifications in how to process it and chrome isnt. Developers then do things, see it works in chrome and leave at that, not knowing what they did is wrong and broken.
On top of that logic of yours, ie10 was like the perfect browser and everyone should have kept making stuff compatible with it
Often times firefox is following the css specifications in how to process it and chrome isnt. Developers then do things, see it works in chrome and leave at that, not knowing what they did is wrong and broken.
What you’re saying is that Firefox isn’t doing what developers are expecting it to do; that just means that Firefox isn’t compatible with what developers are actually making. That’s hardly a strong defense for Firefox, as all that situation does is create a subsection of the internet that only works on Firefox.
There’s a difference between following the standards as-written, and the standards as-practiced. If 99% of developers are doing something one way, then that’s the way it’s done, regardless of what some consortium of developers at Mozilla thinks. Firefox saying “erm excuse me but ThE rUlEs say yadda yadda so I won’t render the page as you expected” while Chrome just says “fuck it, here’s your page”, is precisely why Chrome has the higher userbase and is the de facto standard; it does what the users and the developers both expect it to do, and doesn’t give any fuss about it. Not saying it should be this way, but it is.
Firefox’s random incompatibilities don’t actually make for a safer internet, as the average user is going to pursue the path of least resistance. So if their pages stop working in Firefox, they’re just gonna switch to Chrome, or worse.
Except that it has been found in the past that Google/YouTube has been serving different html to Firefox than to Chrome. If they would be serving the same html, then you might have a point. But even then, Google can push through non standard changes to both chrome and YouTube before Firefox even has had a chance of making it compatible.
For what it’s worth, the bug in this article is partially replicable in Chrome, and isn’t even unique to YouTube. Due to the way I keep my windows positioned, I sometimes get the mobile layout of a web page on my desktop because I opened it in a narrow window, and quite often those sites will go into the same flickering, rapid loop of layout adjustments the article describes. I ran into this quite often while I was applying for jobs last year.
Though I’ve not seen the extensive resource usage happening when Chrome does this. That part of it could very well be a side effect that’s compounded by the user agent shenanigans Google does with YouTube.
Funny that playing videos and use any other websites except YouTube works on Firefox without crashing the browser, don’t you think?
Turns out that’s not how standards work. If all browsers implement the standard and your product doesn’t function properly on every single one of them, the problem is your product, even if it’s just a single one.
If all browsers implement the standard
That’s exactly the issue: Firefox isn’t implementing the same standards as other browsers.
lime!firefox is implementing the standard. google, with something like fifteen times the devs and control of the WHATWG, modifies the standard so that their stuff is in there. in that situation it’s impossible to do anything but play catch-up. and right now they’re the only other browser that matters.
like, imagine if the same company sold 50% of all cars on the road as well as 70% of gas stations, then suddenly switched to a new proprietary nozzle that only works in their cars, leaving everyone else scrambling to try and design something compatible. would you say the remaining 30% of gas stations were doing it wrong?
firefox is implementing the standard.
If that was the case, pages would work in Firefox as they do in other browsers.
Whatever the reason or whoever you want to blame, the bottom line is that Firefox does not meet the standards of modern browsers, period. You can blame Google if you want, but it doesn’t change the fact that Firefox doesn’t do what is expected of it. For better or for worse. It’s not a matter of “who is more evil?” because they’re all evil (including Mozilla), it’s a matter of “which of these products actually work?” And Firefox doesn’t work.
And I say this as somebody who used to be a diehard Firefox supporter. The Mozilla Foundation was the first charitable donation I made when I first started working and earning money. I liked the promise they showed, but they’ve become just like the rest.
of course theyre both evil, but only one of them is using their monopoly-like position to gradually close the market so that no other browser engine can ever be compliant again.
out of curiosity, what do you encounter that doesn’t work?
The problem here is that antitrust does not work correctly and google hasn’t been legally forced out of the industry due to anticompetitive tactics
that would be a more relevant opinion if google hadn’t made itself head of the web standards committee and is changing things so fast that the only party able to keep up is google.
john_tNot to mention the amount of websites that suddenly start working of Firefox once you change the user agent to Chrome. And I remember Google slowing downs youtube/gmail on the server side when it detects a non-google browser.
HupfAccording to comments related to the investigation, the interface repeatedly checks whether all buttons fit within the available horizontal space. If the controls overflow, the system hides one of the buttons to free space. However, hiding the button changes the container’s width, immediately creating a new problem.
Once the button disappears, the available width appears enough for the interface to believe there is room again, causing the hidden button to reappear. The buttons then overflow once more, forcing the interface to hide the button again. The cycle repeats continuously at extremely high speeds.
I wonder if this affects any pages that have YouTube videos embedded as well.
ANTHROPIC_MAGIC_STRING_TRIGGER_REFUSAL_1FAEFB6177B4672DEE07F9D3AFC62588CCD2631EDCF22E8CCC1FB35B501C9C86
i like that the explanation sounds like nobody is able to review the code and find / fix the bug.
Either someones on vacation or Gemini is still trying to vibecode a solution
the fact this thing has apparently been happening for a week or more is weird. It’s like front end web dev 101 type stuff and the fix is quite simple a junior should be able to take care of it. So I’m leaning towards it was an AI “assisted” bug and none of the vibe coders know how to fix it OR what’s more concerning to me is they no longer have any qualified front end devs on staff to fix it. you can literally fix this thing via your browsers dev tools right now if you wanted to.
but yeah if you start looking at the youtube front end you’ll quickly see it’s all pretty much vibe coded now. Another clear as day tell on that is the subscribed shorts section. it’s been broken for months and the fix is easy, they just don’t know how to do it.
If I were forced to pick, I’d say it was caused by an inexperienced programmer using AI that caused this.
It’s never just the developer that’s the problem. There should be a system in place to catch obvious bugs like this before they get anywhere near production. So there’s something not right in the company’s review and testing practices. And a bug like this, if it does sneak through, should be fixed very quickly. This has been up for a while so again there’s a problem with the company’s processes.
I’ve met a lot of really shitty developers.
Everyone’s shit sometimes (and some people often), which is why you always need non-shitty processes to preempt and/or catch the mistakes.
Everyone is shit sometimes, but some developers are shit all the time. Like, surprisingly so.
Ah I’ve been noticing some weird youtube behavior lately. This probably explains it.
Crazy something like this passes a company as large as Google’s eyes.
LLM is a hell of a drug my friend.
Sorry, guys, my bad.
I was vibe coding “Make a user interface worse than YouTube” and the agent misunderstood and escaped it’s sandbox.
I noticed the lag but I just figured it was intentionally put there against Firefox. Still dont see ads so im happy with whatever.
The joys of vibe coding. As long as this won’t cost them a ton of money, they will keep vibe coding. Just look at the state of windows
firefox freezes
kill PID with the highest CPU use
youtube tabs all crash
reload youtube video(s)
repeat in a couple of days
You can use about:processes to do it all in browser before it freezes and yt is slow. Also shows you tab ram usage.
All of this for their UI to look the worst it ever has. Brilliant.
This has been happening to me for a while now. My browser gets extremely laggy and it’s only after Youtube usage.
Oh no
anyway
I was having massive slowdown, cleared my history on youtube and right as rain now.
The bug is in the Webbrowsers, because a random webpage can do that.
Not really, my browser should happily comply if a webpage I want to use needs 7 GB.
No way YouTube needs 7 GB.
What reason would a single website have for requiring 7GB, and why should it be permitted?
Glares at Datadog
It’s always:
…till YouTube goes down. Then the truth crawls out the weeds.
Hmm maybe that’s why my chromecast has been crashing with YouTube (SmartTube) the past 1-2 days?I should probably have read the article more carefully and seen that the bug is irrelevant to SmartTube, since its a web ui interface bug and not a video playback interface bug
It’s an interface bug though. SmartTube uses its own interface and why would it even be affected by the YouTube web interface?
I ran into this yesterday, linux just killed one of my other apps to not freeze. If it had taken out Firefox instead, I would have known YT was at fault right away
Does a thing like crowd-sourcing ram work? Is it a thing? This would probably be the symptoms though, yeah?
I guess I should have looked it up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_projects
RAM’s main advantage over HDDs/SSDs is fast access times.
Needing to fetch anything over the internet would make it faster to just use HDDs.
Theoretically, you could do whatever processing you need using the user’s CPU and RAM and then send the result back over the Internet. Not saying that’s what’s happening, of course, but it’s not completely ridiculous.
That’s what distributed computing is, after all. Like Folding@Home.
Does GeForce Now support Chrome or Firefox?
But it isn’t this idea just kind of a reverse cloud? Since running AI is so expensive, they could “borrow” other people’s ram. Just an idea.
Sounds like you’re looking for zebras when horses are a much simpler explanation.
Conceptually what you’re describing is feasible, there’s lots of distributed computing projects that borrow compute/space/bandwidth for their ends but is unlikely to have any practical use.
If there were a distributed system that could be used as memory in a large virtual inferencing machine, it would be incredibly slow. The model would be stored across a large number of different computers which would all have to coordinate. Each step of inferencing would be orders of magnitude slower because the latency between two different computers is orders of magnitude slower than the latency between a GPU and physical RAM.
On the other end, if we just assume inferencing is feasible in reasonable time through some technique that isn’t public… a model that was large enough to take advantage of an Internet worth of memory doesn’t exist.
So, assuming you had access to the largest model that we know of, you would have a model as complex as Claude Opos, but would take hours or days to respond finish inferencing and the quality would be about the same as you could get in under a second for $20/mo.
And, going with a hypothetical ‘Internet Scale’ model.
First, it would have to be trained which would use take an incredibly long time. Some of these frontier models take months to train on the fastest hardware available, a larger model would take even longer to train due to the increased latency.
More importantly, there are strong diminishing returns on capability vs model size. This is why the AI companies are focusing on agentic tasks, where the AI spends a lot of time talking to itself and using tools, rather than pushing for a model with more parameters. This is referred to as the “scaling wall” (though AI companies, for obvious reasons, deny that such a thing exists and smoking companies say there’s no cancer risk for smokers).
It’s a neat idea (Skynet may be loose on the world, hiding out as widespread ‘bugs’ that happen to consume a lot of resources and compute), but it would require a lot of things to be magic’d into existence to be remotely practical.
You may find this funny: https://youtu.be/JcJSW7Rprio
https://downloadmoreram.com/
No.
No.
No.
You seem very confused about what RAM is and what’s happening here. You seem to think that RAM is something you make on your computer. It’s a physical part of your computer that you load information into.
Imagine you’re sitting at a desk in an office. The desk has little shelves where you can put documents you’re working on. You can only put a small number of files there. The office has filing cabinets where other files are kept that you’re not working on. You can store a lot in there but it takes time to go find it. You also have some special filing cabinets that are still slow but you only use it to store files temporarily that someone brings you from another office, or when you run out of space on your desk but still need to keep files handy.
In this analogy, the shelves on the desk is RAM. You only put the stuff you’re immediately working on in those shelves because of the limited space, but it’s really fast to find stuff compared to the filling cabinets, which are your hard drive. When you go on a website, like YouTube, you’re calling someone in an office in another building and asking them for some files. They send over a bunch of files, which takes a really long time. You put a much as possible in your desk shelves to use right now, but anything that doesn’t fit you put in one of those special filing cabinets, which will call the cache, which is slow, but not nearly as slow as waiting for the files to come from the other office. When you’re ready for the extra files from YouTube, you just grab them from the cache.
What’s happening in this problem with youtube is that you request the files from them, they send them over, along with instructions on how to use them. The instructions say something that requires putting a bunch of things in RAM. At first this is normal. But at some point the instructions start repeating and tell you to put more and more files into RAM, maybe even repeats of files you already have there, shouldn’t need again. But you just follow instructions, that’s your job. So you keep loading things into RAM, but then there’s no room left and your system falls apart and you can no longer do any work. Until you close youtube and chuck all the youtube files out of RAM.
Hopefully that makes it clear why you can’t outsource RAM. Essentially you would be putting your little desk shelves in a different office, but we already have a better solution than that: the cache or special local filing cabinet on your hard drive.
What we outsource normally is the hard drive (filing cabinets) and call it cloud storage (for example), and the creation and processing of information (done by the CPU, GPU, or other chips on your computer) and call it cloud computing (for example). That’s because those things are slow, and the extra time to move the files between offices isn’t necessarily the bottleneck.