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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> might be intimidated to delve onto FF settings

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

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.

This is a YouTube feature, not a Firefox one.