Google enforces HTML5 use on YouTube for Firefox
Google Chrome users who are regulars on Google's video hosting platform YouTube have been forced to use the HTML5 player on the website for some time now.
Google provided Chrome users as well as users of other browsers a choice in this regard in the past.
The HTML5 player was opt-in for example which meant that users had to visit the YouTube HTML5 Video Player page to switch from Flash to it if they wanted to use it as the main player on the site.
This option was removed for Chrome users visiting the page, and it has now also been removed for Firefox 33 users who visit it.
What this means is that Google will enforce the use of HTML5 video on YouTube for all Firefox users who use Firefox 33 or newer on their system to do so (Note this means Firefox Nightly currently, but on Tuesday also Firefox Aurora).
Update: Google seems to have delayed the change. Firefox 34 users can switch players right now on the site.
Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera users, and Firefox users who use version 32 or earlier of the browser, are not affected by this yet. They still get the "request the HTML5 player" or "use the default player" button on the HTML5 page on YouTube to switch between Flash video and HTML5 video.
Mozilla did implement support for Media Source Extensions (MSE) and WebM VP9 recently, but the feature is not enabled by default at the time of writing. While it will be enabled in the future, it is necessary to enable it right now in Firefox to make use of it.
If you don't enable the feature, Media Source Extensions is not supported which limits which videos you can play using the HTML5 player.
The main issue for Firefox users is that the browser does not support MSE & H.264 which means that you may run into issues playing some videos on YouTube.
Note: I have no insight into how YouTube handles this. The text "is currently used when possible" suggests that the site will fall back to other playback options, Adobe Flash more or less, when videos cannot be played using HTML5.
So what can you do about it?
If videos play fine on YouTube you do not necessarily have to change anything. If you notice that some videos won't play anymore because of the change, you may want to force YouTube to use the Flash Player instead.
One of the better ways to do so is to fake your user agent so that YouTube detects Firefox 31 when you connect to the site.
- Download and install User Agent Switcher or a comparable add-on for the browser.
- Load about:addons and click on options next to User Agent Switcher.
- Select New > New User Agent and enter FF31 as the description, and Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0 as the user agent.
- Click ok.
You can switch to that user agent using the Tools menu. Press the Alt-key to display it and switch to the new user agent whenever you are visiting YouTube.
You should not run into (many) compatibility issues doing so, and you may want to keep the user agent registered permanently for the time being if you visit YouTube regularly.
The result is that you can select between the HTML5 video player and the Flash Player on YouTube. (via Sören)
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thanks you saved my 1000 tabs :)
Fantastic! Thank you! This worked like a charm. Had exactly the same issue in Firefox on a PC and this fixed it.
Thank you for sharing this! Like you, I’d noticed that disabling/re-enabling the extension would work for that browser session, but I hadn’t tried anything yet to force a fix. I’m SO glad it was this easy!
I sure hope the OneTab team issues an official fix ASAP, though. Now that it’s been a few days, they’re starting to get bad reviews, which is unfortunate.
Yes! I also tried the workaround. I also reported this bug to OneTab team on the first day I faced this issue.
Thanks, Ashwin for the fix!
I was nearing desperation when I found your direction. It worked.
Thank you so much.
Hi, OneTab developer here. Sorry for this – it’s not clear why this bug is suddenly happening for some people, but we’re urgently investigating this with the Mozilla/Firefox team and will be providing a fix very shortly.
Thank you so much for sharing this fix! You saved my tabs. The only note/point I would like to add is for Step 2.
Perhaps put a note stating they should copy Step 3 and forward of your tutorial to Word. Once we close Firefox, we lose visibility to your tutorial. For me, I know I would not be able to remember the .bkp.
Again, thank you!
Easy temporary fix: To make OneTab work again, type “about:addons” in your Firefox address bar. Then find OneTab in the list of extensions, and click the blue toggle button twice. This will disable and then re-enable OneTab, and cause it to work again.
We’re working with Mozilla for a permanent fix. Sorry for the inconvenience, this is a very strange issue that is only affecting the Firefox version of OneTab.
I have found by disabling and then re-enable in the add on menu I get my tab back. Short term fix. Will try yours.
Thank you. I thought I had lost a month of digging. I’ll be a little more attentive about exporting the urls from the extension list now. It’s a great tool but Firefox doesn’t always play nice with its extensions.
Good news – I’ve been working with Mozilla all morning to resolve this. Mozilla have confirmed it was due to a bug in Firefox (related to extension permissions downgrades).
To fix OneTab, just go to “about:addons” in your Firefox address bar, click the ‘cog’ icon in the top right, and click ‘Check for updates’. This will upgrade you to OneTab v1.39, which fixes the issue.
Darn, I tried everything here and I still can’t get my tabs back. I even did a full system restore to a point last week hoping that my saved tabs would be in the old .xpi file, but no luck.
I’m pretty disappointed :(
Probably I should’ve been more patient, but now I don’t know how to feel about this. I lost about 900 tabs in the recovery process (I reinstalled OneTab), which, incredible as it sounds, weren’t all just a messy dump I’m never going back to, but actually important stuff (yeah, I have a peculiar workflow).
Trying to suppress the anger and reflecting on what happened, it seems I should blame myself for not having a backup. But surely I couldn’t back it up manually every time I save a tab, it would defy all purpose of having this addon in the first place. A couple of years ago data was stored at “~/.mozilla/firefox/%PROFILE%/jetpack/[email protected]/simple-storage”, and you could back it up with simple crontab. This is no longer the case, this folder is just empty. And since OneTab is closed-source black box, I couldn’t have done anything else as well.
So the only reasonable lesson to be learned is that I actually must stop relying on OneTab, since sooner or later it will let me down again. Fuck it.
I just disable and re-enable. No tabs lost!
I switched from OneTab to Tab Stash (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-stash/) months ago and haven’t looked back. I had never experienced any data loss with OneTab, although I was a bit concerned by some reports of data loss I read about. My main issue was with OneTabs performance, it’s a hog. I had been looking for a replacement and testing out a ton of addons for a couple of months when I finally discovered Tab Stash, and am damn glad I did. I really can’t recommend it strongly enough…
Thanks, bsdaddict. Never tried it, looks nice, but I’m a bit concerned by small number of stashed tabs on these screenshots, not sure if it’d be usable when stashing a lot of tabs. How many tabs do you usually have stashed?
Tab Stash is is a great alternative to One Tab, y’all… I made the switch months ago and am very happy with it.
>DO THIS FIRST: Before trying the following fix, I recommend disabling OneTab and re-enabling it from the about:addons page, to access and regain your tabs.
Worked for me! Many, many thanks!
I know it’s late but ist there an option for chrome on android tablets aswell? My wife hates it that the search bar and Tab list will just come Up again when she Scrolls up