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Comment by asvitkine | Hacker News Reader

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."

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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

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.

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

> 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

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

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

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

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