7 ms·

What doesn't work with YouTube on Firefox? Asked as on mobile I run as few apps as possible, so use the web version. Haven't seen any issues.

by ethbr1 2y ago

diggan 2y ago
> What doesn't work with YouTube on Firefox? The performance is way worse (which Google engineers will explain by some browser API being slower in Firefox and they haven't yet had time to optimize it, N years later [they did the same with Inbox + Firefox before]) and you'll also see more ads if you're not a paying user and using Firefox compared to if you used Google Chrome.
- jeffbee 2y ago
  The last serious performance issue I saw with FF+YT was when YT added a glowing border around videos when the tab was in dark mode. FF just wasn't able to efficiently run that effect. I don't think it's very reasonable to say that YT or any other site should be limited by the performance problems of FF. Maybe they should have detected the issue before release but the explosion of browser x platform x dark/light theme x graphics driver is a large space to sweep.
  - WorldMaker 2y ago
    "Should have detected the issue" implies it was an accident. YouTube has intentionally tanked performance in non-Chrome browsers before and been caught. Even when they weren't actively sabotaging other browsers they had big Chrome banners and "Works Better in Chrome" signs for several years in the past. If they did it _then_, it's hard to give them the benefit of the doubt that they just "missed it" now, and easier to assume they do things that are broken in other browsers intentionally.
    - jeffbee 2y ago
      "Intentionally tanked" is just nerd spin. I've never seen an actually convincing recitation of these stories.
    - cornstalks 2y ago
      > YouTube has intentionally tanked performance in non-Chrome browsers before and been caught. Can you please share sources regarding this? I'm not familiar with any instance like this.
      - WorldMaker 2y ago
        Edge (Spartan or Legacy) had a big fight with YouTube that YouTube was doing a hidden (not visible to users) DOM animation underneath the video player in a way that Chrome ignored but tanked Edge performance. There were several release cycles where Edge would specifically target that hidden animation performance, only for YouTube to make the animation worse and ratchet it back. I lived through that as a user. (I was one of the like 5 Edge Spartan users, I know, lol.) I could see the dumb animation in dev tools and manually delete it for better performance. It was a nice thing I had some technical skills. I know for mainstream users the solution was "watch YouTube in Chrome". It's hard to find to other sources because Microsoft intentionally broke the SEO on the Edge brand and you know Google is the only other major search engine. Not that they'd intentionally down-pagerank bad news about a Google property, I'm sure.
      - fsflover 2y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40736397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40736397
ustad 2y ago
A lot of the reported issues with YouTube on Firefox (especially when paired with adblockers) involve things like increased page load times, UI elements not functioning as smoothly, or even video playback glitches. Some of this is due to JavaScript that’s intentionally designed to slow things down if you’re blocking ads or using a non-Google browser, as we’ve been discussing.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  I haven't seen any bugs on Firefox mobile + uBlock Origin + Android + Pixel 4a 5g (I hate upgrading phones, sue me). The only glitch I reliably get is watching videos at 1.5x sometimes freezes video (but audio still plays). Expect that's more hardware and memory pressure related tho. Also, I wasn't aware YouTube mobile has ads? I think uBlock might be eating them. Although possibly whatever is lagging others experiences too...
  - officeplant 2y ago
    >Also, I wasn't aware YouTube mobile has ads? I think uBlock might be eating them. That would be the point of an ad-block add-on wouldn't it?
- Izkata 2y ago
  I would guess most of that is probably Polymer. IIRC the story was, when Youtube was redesigned a while ago they used an early spec for Web Components, that they were pushing to be standardized and was fully implemented in Chrome. But they had to add Polymer as a polyfill for other browsers. Then the version of Web Components we actually got wasn't entirely compatible with that early spec, so Polymer is still in use for non-Chrome browsers. I don't know how much of that's changed since then, but the complaints are basically the same as when that happened.
elephanlemon 2y ago
I ended up switching back from Firefox to Chrome after a few weeks because I found that if I had more than about 6 YouTube tabs opened, the YouTube interface would become very laggy. I blamed it on Firefox at the time but maybe it was something intentional by Google.
- wussboy 2y ago
  How…how many videos are you watching at one time?
  - scott_w 2y ago
    Not OP but I read it as "6 tabs" not "6 YouTube tabs."
    - lxgr 2y ago
      I sometimes do have several Youtube tabs open to line up things I want to watch next.
      - ethbr1 2y ago
        To this, have you tried running a no-autoplay style extension? (Not exactly this scenario, but lists might be modifiable) I expect YT is probably doing some preloading or heavyweight running in a loaded-but-not-playing tab. Convert that to load-on-click, and you'll likely fix your issue.
        lxgr 2y ago
        No need – Firefox does that out of the box for tabs opened in the background (I open tabs via middle/command click)! So there is no problem for me.
        wruza 2y ago
        We’re shifting targets here. The fact is, it doesn’t happen in Chrome for “magical” reasons, according to a comment few levels up. And regular non-tech users won’t debug this with click to play or whatever. We expect that YT does it absolutely intentionally. It bends userbases however it wants due to its multi-dimensional reach, and we’re like “hmm maybe extension would help prevent accidental preloading issue”. I just don’t get it.
conradfr 2y ago
Not totally related but on Firefox mobile you can't have a Youtube video playing while switching to another app anymore.
- prmoustache 2y ago
  Aren't every firefox user using newpipe or other yt frontends on mobile? I mean if you care enough to not use the default mobile browser, surely you found out about newpipe and the myriad of other youtube frontends.
  - officeplant 2y ago
    My main issue is NewPipe struggles with being attached to an account. Its a great app for me to open a video link in / use to download it. While using firefox mobile + ublock its easier to be logged into a youtube account and dig through favorites, etc.
- tuukkah 2y ago
  I think this is something that Google requires on Play Store, but there's a Firefox extension you can install to make it work: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/video-background-play-fix/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/video-backgro...
20after4 2y ago
Are you on Android? AFAIK Mobile Firefox on iOS is just safari with a different skin and on Android it's still not really the same as desktop Firefox. I think what's actually happening is that they are targeting uBlock + Firefox on desktop for punishment.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  Mobile Firefox on Android.
rurban 2y ago
With Firefox on Linux HD Videos are the default, whilst Chrome hasn't integrated DRM for a long time, leading to SD only. On Android, Firefox has much more extensions, such adblockers. FUD

What doesn't work with YouTube on Firefox? Asked as on mobile I run as few apps as possible, so use the web version. Haven't seen any issues.

by ethbr1 2y ago

What doesn't work with YouTube on Firefox? Asked as on mobile I run as few apps as possible, so use the web version. Haven't seen any issues.

diggan 2y ago

> What doesn't work with YouTube on Firefox? The performance is way worse (which Google engineers will explain by some browser API being slower in Firefox and they haven't yet had time to optimize it, N years later [they did the same with Inbox + Firefox before]) and you'll also see more ads if you're not a paying user and using Firefox compared to if you used Google Chrome.

jeffbee 2y ago
The last serious performance issue I saw with FF+YT was when YT added a glowing border around videos when the tab was in dark mode. FF just wasn't able to efficiently run that effect. I don't think it's very reasonable to say that YT or any other site should be limited by the performance problems of FF. Maybe they should have detected the issue before release but the explosion of browser x platform x dark/light theme x graphics driver is a large space to sweep.
- WorldMaker 2y ago
  "Should have detected the issue" implies it was an accident. YouTube has intentionally tanked performance in non-Chrome browsers before and been caught. Even when they weren't actively sabotaging other browsers they had big Chrome banners and "Works Better in Chrome" signs for several years in the past. If they did it _then_, it's hard to give them the benefit of the doubt that they just "missed it" now, and easier to assume they do things that are broken in other browsers intentionally.
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    "Intentionally tanked" is just nerd spin. I've never seen an actually convincing recitation of these stories.
  - cornstalks 2y ago
    > YouTube has intentionally tanked performance in non-Chrome browsers before and been caught. Can you please share sources regarding this? I'm not familiar with any instance like this.
    - WorldMaker 2y ago
      Edge (Spartan or Legacy) had a big fight with YouTube that YouTube was doing a hidden (not visible to users) DOM animation underneath the video player in a way that Chrome ignored but tanked Edge performance. There were several release cycles where Edge would specifically target that hidden animation performance, only for YouTube to make the animation worse and ratchet it back. I lived through that as a user. (I was one of the like 5 Edge Spartan users, I know, lol.) I could see the dumb animation in dev tools and manually delete it for better performance. It was a nice thing I had some technical skills. I know for mainstream users the solution was "watch YouTube in Chrome". It's hard to find to other sources because Microsoft intentionally broke the SEO on the Edge brand and you know Google is the only other major search engine. Not that they'd intentionally down-pagerank bad news about a Google property, I'm sure.
    - fsflover 2y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40736397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40736397

ustad 2y ago

A lot of the reported issues with YouTube on Firefox (especially when paired with adblockers) involve things like increased page load times, UI elements not functioning as smoothly, or even video playback glitches. Some of this is due to JavaScript that’s intentionally designed to slow things down if you’re blocking ads or using a non-Google browser, as we’ve been discussing.

ethbr1 2y ago
I haven't seen any bugs on Firefox mobile + uBlock Origin + Android + Pixel 4a 5g (I hate upgrading phones, sue me). The only glitch I reliably get is watching videos at 1.5x sometimes freezes video (but audio still plays). Expect that's more hardware and memory pressure related tho. Also, I wasn't aware YouTube mobile has ads? I think uBlock might be eating them. Although possibly whatever is lagging others experiences too...
- officeplant 2y ago
  >Also, I wasn't aware YouTube mobile has ads? I think uBlock might be eating them. That would be the point of an ad-block add-on wouldn't it?
Izkata 2y ago
I would guess most of that is probably Polymer. IIRC the story was, when Youtube was redesigned a while ago they used an early spec for Web Components, that they were pushing to be standardized and was fully implemented in Chrome. But they had to add Polymer as a polyfill for other browsers. Then the version of Web Components we actually got wasn't entirely compatible with that early spec, so Polymer is still in use for non-Chrome browsers. I don't know how much of that's changed since then, but the complaints are basically the same as when that happened.

elephanlemon 2y ago

I ended up switching back from Firefox to Chrome after a few weeks because I found that if I had more than about 6 YouTube tabs opened, the YouTube interface would become very laggy. I blamed it on Firefox at the time but maybe it was something intentional by Google.

wussboy 2y ago
How…how many videos are you watching at one time?
- scott_w 2y ago
  Not OP but I read it as "6 tabs" not "6 YouTube tabs."
  - lxgr 2y ago
    I sometimes do have several Youtube tabs open to line up things I want to watch next.
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      To this, have you tried running a no-autoplay style extension? (Not exactly this scenario, but lists might be modifiable) I expect YT is probably doing some preloading or heavyweight running in a loaded-but-not-playing tab. Convert that to load-on-click, and you'll likely fix your issue.
      - lxgr 2y ago
        No need – Firefox does that out of the box for tabs opened in the background (I open tabs via middle/command click)! So there is no problem for me.
      - wruza 2y ago
        We’re shifting targets here. The fact is, it doesn’t happen in Chrome for “magical” reasons, according to a comment few levels up. And regular non-tech users won’t debug this with click to play or whatever. We expect that YT does it absolutely intentionally. It bends userbases however it wants due to its multi-dimensional reach, and we’re like “hmm maybe extension would help prevent accidental preloading issue”. I just don’t get it.

conradfr 2y ago

Not totally related but on Firefox mobile you can't have a Youtube video playing while switching to another app anymore.

prmoustache 2y ago
Aren't every firefox user using newpipe or other yt frontends on mobile? I mean if you care enough to not use the default mobile browser, surely you found out about newpipe and the myriad of other youtube frontends.
- officeplant 2y ago
  My main issue is NewPipe struggles with being attached to an account. Its a great app for me to open a video link in / use to download it. While using firefox mobile + ublock its easier to be logged into a youtube account and dig through favorites, etc.
tuukkah 2y ago
I think this is something that Google requires on Play Store, but there's a Firefox extension you can install to make it work: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/video-background-play-fix/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/video-backgro...

20after4 2y ago

Are you on Android? AFAIK Mobile Firefox on iOS is just safari with a different skin and on Android it's still not really the same as desktop Firefox. I think what's actually happening is that they are targeting uBlock + Firefox on desktop for punishment.

ethbr1 2y ago
Mobile Firefox on Android.

rurban 2y ago

With Firefox on Linux HD Videos are the default, whilst Chrome hasn't integrated DRM for a long time, leading to SD only. On Android, Firefox has much more extensions, such adblockers. FUD