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Comment by ethbr1 | Hacker News Reader

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.

> 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.

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.

"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.

"Intentionally tanked" is just nerd spin. I've never seen an actually convincing recitation of these stories.

> 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.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40736397

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.

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...

>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?

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.

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.

How…how many videos are you watching at one time?

Not OP but I read it as "6 tabs" not "6 YouTube tabs."

I sometimes do have several Youtube tabs open to line up things I want to watch next.

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.

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.

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.

On the internet, no one knows you have compound eyes.

I go through my feed or history and bg-open the links I want to watch. Then I watch them.

What a strange confusion, as if all people must have the same "workflow". Sorry, no intent to sound negative, but why not give it some thought at least. It's "6 tabs", not "6 videos playing at the same time".

As someone who hates the auto-recommendation system on YouTube and turns it off, I also appreciate this is sometimes the safest/easiest way to watch only the videos I actually intend to watch.

This seems intentionally YouTube's UX design fault, they too heavily try to push you to "auto-play". YouTube has a "Watchlist" feature where you can build a playlist. When it works it is exactly what I want, but it feels like every so many months it mysteriously breaks for a while or they hide the button for it behind some new hidden gesture or menu they expect you psychic out of their UI. (If you've never heard of "Watchlist", no wonder. It seems intentionally hard to discover.) Lately I've been complaining that YouTube adds random "auto-play" videos even to a manually curated "Watchlist" if you don't pay enough attention or watch past the end of the list (even with auto-play and recommendations entirely off).

I guess it’s not the same as Watch Later. I think I remember “add to queue” button right on videos, that was it probably.

I’m still using Watch Later, but for long videos I have no time for.

Yeah, it was named "Queue" for a while at one point. I think "Watchlist" is the most consistent name it has had, and yeah that does add (intentional?) confusion with Watch Later.

My Firefox does this on Windows. I have no idea how many tabs I have open, but regularly the whole YouTube tab I have open freezes, especially if you try to watch one video, and then another, and the whole UI is delayed by many seconds. Even closing the tab will have the audio playing for several seconds in the background. It's not due to load or hardware as far as I can tell. The videos play just fine in Chrome or Edge. I still use Firefox as my daily browser (previously Chrome), but these issues are super annoying. I don't want to have to restart my browser or PC all the time. I don't know if it's some combination of extension/ad-blocking or YouTube doing stuff, but it's very annoying.

Unrelated to that, but on a Ubuntu laptop I have Firefox tabs regularly stop working entirely. They just won't load anything, and the only fix is to open a new tab and that loads fine most of the time. Other times I have to restart Firefox. I've tried searching for others experiencing this problem and even asked in Mozilla channels on Matrix, but even then I didn't come up with any answers. The laptop's hinge broke last year so I haven't used it since then, so likely never going to figure out what was going on.

Maybe more related to youtube than I thought, but I have trouble closing tabs and firefox with 15 or 20 tabs would eat all my CPU. Pages loaded much slower and the experience across the board was often pretty poor. I had to go back to Chrome and I don't miss FF at all. I tried.

That is not my experience. I use FF exclusively, I can't remember the last time I used Chrome.

I have over 1200 tabs open at the moment, including at least 100 youtube tabs, and mine runs fine even with a bunch of other stuff running.

I do find that if I go over 150 windows open then things start to become problematic, but I think that's because my GPU is only 8Gb.

CPU is usually at about 10% on an i7-12900k.

This was fixed in the latest update: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/134.0.1/releasenotes/

Update your firefox now and the issue is gone.

It was basically the whole reason for the update.

Google changed their code to create a bunch of objects over time, and those objects didn't get cleaned up. It was just a standard memory leak issue.

Except it heavily impacted users who kept a youtube tab open or pinned.

The bug was reported and a fix released in a little under 2 weeks.

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

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.

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.

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-backgro...

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.

Mobile Firefox on Android.

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

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