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Comment by cronix | Hacker News Reader

If you're on a Mac and using FF (probably not FF specific), turning off "ambient mode" in youtube can save 30% cpu. I just found this out while searching why FF was taking 90% of my cpu while watching youtube videos in normal mode, but went down to 40% use if viewing in full screen. Turns out that this youtube "ambient mode" was the culprit. My lap is now cooler and the fan doesn't turn on anymore. I wonder how much power I've wasted due to this new "feature" they added 6 months ago that I didn't know about.

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To save a search:

"Ambient mode uses a lighting effect to make watching videos in Dark theme more immersive, by casting gentle colors from the video, into your screen's background."

They went for copying philips ambient lights on tv's but with software, what could go worng

oh i saw this happen to me the other day, i was wondering if it was a new youtube feature or something. can't say i care for it.

Just noticed it recently too, though it might have been an update to the stylus theme I use, I actually quite like it

Neat idea, I bet the intern had fun implementing it, why was it on by default?

> Neat idea, I bet the intern had fun implementing it, why was it on by default?

Total speculation, but Firefox seems to be pushing out a lot of UI gimmicks. Maybe they're trying to drum up interest in the browser that way, since they seem intent on killing many of their other differentiators.

This is a YouTube feature, not a Firefox one.

Because the target audience for the feature is not tech savvy people but common users whom won't know it exists until it is shown to them/might be intimidated to delve onto FF settings

If you are tech savvy, you are then expected to be able to "bear the burden" of turning the feature off if it bothers you

> might be intimidated to delve onto FF settings

It’s a YouTube setting, not a Firefox setting.

Hell, I'm tech savvy - not a tech worker, but you'd better believe that you want me to be your end-user contact, I know a hell of a lot more than the people I work with - and I didn't even know this was an option. I'm not afraid of fixing FF settings, done it plenty of times. It's on by default. If someone who can install OpenBSD and make it a router for DSL over PPPoE in 2001 (side job) doesn't even know it exists and eats cycles [i.e., a "prosumer", not an expert, but not too far below a new hire and well beyond the masses), it's a bad idea. I don't have time to stay up on every way that people want to eat my electricity. I do know that YouTube spins up the fan on my iMac with disturbing regularity in a way that videos from alternative sources do not. So it's not the decoding.

This seems unnecessarily passive aggressive. Everyone makes mistakes or bugs, intern or not. It makes no sense to get this salty about basic human error. Also there's nothing wrong with implementing minor UX enhancements.

If anything redirect the frustration to the leadership that doesn't prioritize fixing these kinds of errors.

It's not unreasonable to hold YouTube devs and QA engineers to a higher standard than everyone else who doesn't work for a ~trillion dollar corporation or deploy code that runs on billions of devices.

I don't think there's any error to fix. It's a feature - casting light from the video onto the UI, using JS, surely takes that amount of CPU.

The question of why it is on by default stands - because it's little bit of eye candy, vs people's laptop batteries, CPU that could have been used to get other stuff done faster - so also their time, device thermals etc... I don't think it's just unnecessarily salty to point out how the choice to turn this on by default should have been more nuanced and thought through.

How much can websites determine about the power of the device they're running on? Obviously it'd be a security issue for them to know too much, but it would be nice to be able to progressively enhance the experience for more powerful devices that can handle it, beyond just mobile vs PC. Even just knowing whether a device was running off battery power could be useful.

Here's what's available, requires permissions:

- BatteryManager.charging

- BatteryManager.chargingTime

- BatteryManager.dischargingTime

- BatteryManager.level

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/BatteryMana...

https://caniuse.com/?search=BatteryManager

Isn't available in Firefox though...

I don't think you really want websites to make this determination anyway. There are a million reasons why a user might want a website to use fewer resources than their machine could support.

It should just be a setting the user can select. No probing of the machine necessary.

What should be a setting? This specific youtube ambience thing? That is, but it shows the issue - you need to pick a default, and most people won't know they can change it. Having some idea of the capabilities of the device you're running on could allow you to choose sensible defaults.

But if you mean there should be a setting in the browser that websites could check, I agree that could be better.

Sensible defaults go a long way, yes! Although in the case of this YouTube thing, I think the sensible default is to have it disabled regardless of the capabilities of the machine.

IMO the implementation sucks and the feature is questionable. Recently I set the browser to dark mode, which tells YT to also use dark mode, and if I haven't read here I wouldn't know that this is a toggleable feature. It's sad when we can't tell a feature and a bug apart.

Not being able to distinguish between a feature and a bug is a feature, not a bug.

It's an UI issue.

Just to be clear I was being a bit snarky, but what I meant is that this is sort of a small, fun, less important project that could be easily given to an intern.

I don’t think there is a bug? It seems like a sort of image processing thing that might take a bit of compute run. To the extent that there’s blame, I’d lay the blame at the feet of whoever decided it should be turned on by default.

We aren’t talking about misaligned element here, you know.

There are millions of FF Mac users, it’s not unreasonable to expect YouTube to do some basic testing. Never got any issues showing ads, though.

This is definitely worth getting salty about when you consider the cumulative electricity wasted for something so trivial. Google should be strictly monitoring performance and CPU consumption of their changes on youtube since a screwup there is the climate change equivalent of paying for 747s to fly in circles.

They are not the intern anymore - they are senior vice president of battery draining, this feature absolutely killed it at the end of year review.

For the replier that wanted a more substantive response; my comment can be expanded on by pointing out it is ultimately a commentary on the motivations involved in the employee-manager relationship within the bureaucracy of the mega-corporation, within a society where financial success drives including but not limited to comfort, mate selection, breeding, health, longevity and day-to-day basic survival itself - factors with the importance of which has been determined by millennia of evolutionary biology.

Ultimately the result can be that an employee chooses health, survival and the social status that a job title brings and ships a product or feature that they can sell to their manager as innovative / disruptive / greatness reimagined.

I really like it!

Then again, I am using a real computer and not a toy.

Looks like it's a Youtube feature rather than a Firefox feature?

The "average color" (or whatever it is) could have been pre-computed server-side rather than tiring out the poor innocent client CPUs.

But then Google would be responsible for that one-time computation instead of making the clients do it billions of times.

They could do it on a few clients then ship the data back to the server. If they’re resourceful those clients don’t even need to be watching the video! (they could send it and compute the output in the background of another stream)

But that's a distributed problem now and those use up valuable developer time, which we know is the most important resource in the world...

Yeah, but if google solve distributed processing just imagine the cost savings elsewhere (imagine involuntarily crowdsourcing video encoding, it would save them millions)

Couldn't this be done cheaply on the GPU?

The browser isn’t the ideal place to do things “on the GPU” unless the site is designed around it.

It could probably be somewhat cheaply extracted during decoding.

The effect is created by scaling and blurring the storyboard images that are also used for the seek preview. The image is refreshed every ten seconds, with a CSS opacity animation fading from the old background image to the next over a couple of seconds.

This sounds like it should be relatively cheap if composition is properly accelerated.

To save another search:

On desktop and mobile devices:

    While playing a video, select the Settings button.
    Locate the Ambient Mode setting in the list of preferences.
    Toggle it to off to disable Ambient Mode for all videos on YouTube (in that browser).

It's in the same popup used for video quality and playback speed.

I dont have that option. firefox on windows 10.

only shows up when in 'dark mode'.

that is some amazingly crap UX. who the hell thought this was a good idea?

Ambient mode is a dark mode specific feature. If you don’t use dark mode then it’s not going to do anything.

Completely hiding it in normal mode isn’t the best choice, but it is somewhat understandable.

this makes sense. I stopped doing per site dark mode and just use the darkreader extension to make everything dark mode, so the option never appears.

In dark mode. Don't see it. Windows 11, Edge and Firefox.

Windows 10 and Firefox. In dark theme. No Ambient mode.

For those who may be wondering, the Settings button referred to here is the gear button in the Youtube video player.

for those unfamiliar with visualising a gear, seek the doughnut with a notched circumference

for those unfamiliar with visualizing a doughnut, imagine a bagel-shaped treat of sweet cake-like dough, deep-fried and frosted, with optional sprinkles

What's a bagel?

a jewish torus, plural torah

A bagel is a first-degree pretzel.

For those people unfamiliar with a pretzel, imagine eating something that is making you thirsty.

For those of you unfamiliar with eating, it's similar to photosynthesis, but with matter instead of sunlight.

For those people unfamiliar with this joke, watch the TV show Seinfeld.

For those people unfamiliar with 'TV shows', they are similar to HBO series, but with less interepisodic narrative.

lmao

For those unfamiliar with visuals a bagel, imagine a gear shape, smoothed out and without protrusions

As I don't use edgelord mode I'm guessing I don't have to worry about it.

> make watching videos in Dark theme more immersive

the best way to make youtube videos more immersive is to block obnoxious advertisements, remove useless algorithm-driven recommendations, and delete the comment section

Thank you! I had no idea this was a thing YouTube did.

This is why I like terminal, rss, or other technologies where it’s hard to add this kind of fireworks to the UI.

When done right, sure, they improves the user experience by some percentage. But when done badly, the UX goes down by orders of magnitude.

If you turn off your computer power usage goes to 0% too.

Not for long! [1] It's an unconfirmed rumor for now; but perhaps we're heading there.

> The iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max will use a new ultra-low energy microprocessor allowing certain features like the new capacitive solid-state buttons to remain functional even when the handset is powered off

[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/03/20/iphone-15-volume-mute-b...

absolutely. besides, graphical UIs bombard the brain with everyone's unique take on visual aesthetics, consuming limited mental resources like attention

I honestly thought my monitor or GPU was having issues with weird colour banding around YouTube videos. Turns out it was an intentional choice they made to do that. I don’t know why it’s on by default.

Or stop using the crap YT frontent entirely - https://yewtu.be

Run your own alternate frontend - https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

That site doesn't even seem to support anything over 720p, so much for crap

Wow! didn't know that. Very helpful

Similarly gifs and animated emojis in Slack chews up the CPU. Something like 20% at idle before I turned it off.

Where is that setting? In YouTube Settings? I don't see it, there.

It's not in the general settings - instead it's in the setting menu in the video player itself, where you'd select the quality and playback speed, etc.

its not there for me. I dont see it in any settings anywhere.

I don't see it either, maybe it's on an A/B rollout for desktop.

Is Dark Mode in either your OS or Youtube turned on? It's not an option unless you're in DM.

I stopped doing per-site dark mode and just use the darkreader extension, which is why this option was never there. I call it a win to not deal with per site settings.

oh, I never use dark mode so I guess that is why I don't see it.

If you use uBlock, add the following to the filters:

  youtube.com###cinematics.ytd-watch-flexy

I think it is time to have a way to fine tune consumption based on settings. I assume the less complex way to do this is, really, use the telemetry information gathered.

To be fair this wastes CPU cycles in all platforms. And it probably took more human effort than keeping Google Reader alive FFS.

Same behaviour for me using Safari.

as I don't care about the comments section or the recommender algo, I search (youtube-fzf) and launch (yt-dlp + mpv) youtube videos directly from the terminal. i have a bash pipeline for this and, naturally, it is very resource efficient

post the script pretty please

This is one of the myriad reasons why I have a strong preference for Linux.

This has nothing to do with macOS vs. Linux, though

not sure what your point is... ambient mode is a visual effects thing YouTube does and reading the descriptions, not surprised it causes increased CPU usage regardless of OS.

Something happens

> This is one of the myriad reasons why I have a strong preference for Linux.

Because browser users on Linux have never, ever been shafted by a browser bug? Riiiiiight.

I just bought a Macbook because my dedicated Linux laptop, made by a popular Linux-only manufacturer, had so many issues that I got tired of diagnosing. I love Linux, but it's not a panacea for every computer issue under the sun, just a few of them. I, personally, am stoked I no longer have to deal with issues with this new machine, and can just take it into a Genius bar appointment to let someone else deal with it, for pennies a day. You can't get that on Linux!

Feel free to tell me I'm a sell-out, I am happy to be one today.

You're a sellout but I am too, so welcome :).

> I, personally, am stoked I no longer have to deal with issues with this new machine, and can just take it into a Genius bar appointment to let someone else deal with it, for pennies a day. You can't get that on Linux!

Honest question. If you could get that on Linux, would you? and what kind of pricing would you consider reasonable? Is it something that would have to come with the computer (i.e. would you pay for it separately or would you only use it if it was "free" aka included with your laptop purchase)? Did you stick with the vendor-provided install or did you wipe and install your own preferred distro?

I would pay the same amount for a Linux laptop that worked as easily as a MBP and had similar build quality, performance and battery life.

Howver, whatever crazy-stable and easy to use and well supported hypothetical Linux this is wouldn’t be compatible with my “real” Linux use cases so I would then also install Arch or whatever and live with constantly borked everything and just swap between my Arch “Dev” OS and my “Linux Mac” business/work/consumer OS.

Current Linux cannot be made “MacOS”-stable. But maybe in 5 years.

Current Linux cannot be made “MacOS”-stable. But maybe in 5 years.

Stable?? Linux is a rock of stability, you must mean something else.

Yeah I’m talking about Ubuntu being hyper aggressive about upgrading my GPU drivers even after I turn off all auto updates and borking my entire OS install and this happening enough that it’s faster just to make scripts which auto reinstall Ubuntu and all my versioned packages from scratch.

Or non-Ubuntu, software just randomly falling apart after 2 years. Like I need a newer kernel for a new Wi-Fi card but then I need a different GPU driver and that’s incompatible with some softwares UI library, so they update that but it has an incompatibility with something else.

Or how Linux still has Wi-Fi 6 totally broken.

Sure, Linux is rock stable if you have a production environment where everything is nailed down. But from an actual daily consumer user point of view it doesn’t feel stable. At all.

I love Linux. I love fixing it when it borks. But my god does it break every week.

No. Apparently for you, Ubuntu breaks every week. Not Linux.

Don't blame the good, for the things bad does.

I go months on my Debian desktop without issues, through upgrades, and only reboot for kernel updates!

Just today I needed to run some software only available in .deb and only on Ubuntu 22.04. So whipped out an old laptop that had Ubuntu installed and ran sudo do-release-upgrade to upgrade to 22.04. boom! GUI gone and the terminal was flooded with weird filesystem errors. I had to spend the whole afternoon reinstalling from scratch.

I would love a Linux daily driver but I've had similar experiences to the above every time I've tried it for the last 15 years.

https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/man8/do-release-...

It says use it for non-GUI newest release upgrades? Why are you surprised the GUI disappeared?!

Also, why did to do that, if you wanted to keep the current version?

Anyhow, I never have such issues with Debian. Do bear in mind, Ubuntu(or any distro) is not Linux.

Are you going to call Linux "unstable", because you get a crappy phone with Android(which is judt more Linux).

The kernel yes, the distros and userspace, not so much. Linux is my go to for hosting, but macOS and Windows are designed to prioritize for the desktop user experience.

You seem to be confused, Linux is the most stable OS available for desktop or servers.

I switched to linux. I like it and haven't really had any issues to speak of. Not with sound, video, wifi or any of the other things people complain about. My fan went, but likely it was a pet fur issue, and easy to fix... I'm not an admin. I know how to use the command line, and how to use it as a work machine. Really my experience over the past 3 years, its been as trouble free as my Mac used to be. It really is the great development platform.

Glad you like your machine.

Can you hybernate your system without issues?

it "suspends" fine. I have 3 options, suspend, off and reboot. I usually suspend overnight. Sometimes I turn it off. It boots super fast anyway.

Windows can't be hibernated without issue. My wife had issues the past week already on Windows. She wants me to put Ubuntu back on the machine.

> I switched to linux. I like it and haven't really had any issues to speak of. Not with sound, video, wifi or any of the other things people complain about.

What's your machine+distro?

I'm running a last gen pangolin, (AMD 5700U). Pop OS. I don't do anything too crazy. I develop on JetBrains I did keep it awake for 3 days doing some genetics work I usually do on a cluster. Its fast, quiet and decent on battery. AMD on the notebook is really impressive.

With all the attention being paid to macOS these days, there's enough mods and addon's that I don't miss Linux so much on my laptop. Hammerspoon gets me drag and resize windows how I want, and there's Rectangle.app for tiling-ish window management. There's no /proc, and all the rest of the cli utilities are just wrong (netstat, route, top, etc) but I can live with my M1.

(brew addresses a lot of the issues though, even if I do have to remember to run gdu instead of du (for gnu du))

yabai is the full featured window manager for macos

> With all the attention being paid to macOS these days, there's enough mods and addon's that I don't miss Linux so much on my laptop.

One problem that I have is all that all those mods and add-ons are out there, but there's a real mindset that "everything must be an app" and a pursuant mindset that "might as well charge for it". I don't mind paying for a complicated app, but there are certain basic features that used to be served by the freeware model on Macs that just aren't any more, and my impression is that things are heading ever more in that direction. (As well as in the direction of subscriptions over app purchases, which are right out for me for basic utility needs.)

You mentioned Rectangle.app and Hammerspoon, which are both open source. Do you have any good recommendations for where to look for other high-quality open-source mods and add-ons for macOS?

What are you looking for? I don't have anywhere specific in mind, but with hammerspoon I find myself writing lua to write the functionality I want. Which I used to do with Linux. Ideally I'd write up and post it on a blog or github somewhere though.

Personally I'm okay with paying for software (though I do whine about it from time to time). Yeah it should just be built in functionality, but someone devoted their time to building a thing, so I don't begrudge them a couple bucks for it - so long as it's a one-time purchase and not a recurring subscription model for unchanging functionality.

You are not sellout but just the average Joe. No problem with that I guess. Have fun with your Mac that uses a soldered ssd that when failing makes your whole Mac useless as well.

Meh hasn’t happened yet but I’d just buy a new one. That being said, I always also have a windows and Linux machine, they’re just not my daily drivers.

You just didn’t get my point: in 2023 it’s about the environment at least for me. That’s why I wrote my comment. Just buying a new one is somehow dated imho. But ymmv

Nice part is that I have a warranty for hardware failures! The big issue I have initially is getting used to not having quite as much control over the OS level stuff like Linux, but I was avoiding even using my Linux laptop, so any improvement on usability will get me more productivity than having full control of every aspect of my computing. Maybe someday I’ll have time like I did when I was young, but until then I just prefer to have everything work together seamlessly, as things should in 2023. Apple offers that kind of support and service for a price I’m willing to pay.

Being an average Joe is fine with me.

This happens on Linux too. I was wondering if the weird CPU-hogging flickering was a bug in my compositor (picom) or window manager (i3) or browser (Firefox). Turns out to be a "feature".

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