code-charity
🐞Turning on "Force Autoplay Off" prevents youtube videos from playing at all
Concise Description
Toggling "Force Autoplay Off" to "on" breaks all youtube videos; they do not start at all. Reloading the page, logging out of my account, or trying to access the video through a private tab makes no difference.
Once, I toggled the setting to "on" in the middle of a video, and in this one case the video kept playing, but when it reached the end, it autoplayed the next video. So the purpose of the setting also failed in this instance.
I only experience this issue in Mobile Firefox (Nightly version). I haven't tested the non-Nightly Mobile version, but I doubt that's the problem, in part because this has been an problem for a while now, and in part because I saw a similar report from someone who uses Chrome.
This issue does not occur for me in the desktop version of Firefox (non-nightly, on Windows 10, 64 bit).
More or less related issues include: "Force Autoplay Off not working #3087" and ""Toggling Force Autoplay Off to on prevent the video from playing #2919""
Browser/s
Firefox
Other Browser:
Mobile Firefox Nightly, specifically.
'Steps to reproduce' - Which of our features is required for the bug to happen?
Go to settings, then "Player", then toggle "Force Autoplay Off" to "On". May potentially only occur in a mobile browser.
Since when?
I'm not sure, but for months at least. It's been a problem for me since I started trying to use the extension.
Does the bug still happen when you log out of YouTube?
Yes
..No? Then please paste your yt.config_.EXPERIMENT_FLAGS. Twice (With the error & Without)
No response
Are any errors or related log-messages shown in the Browser-Console? (F12)
No response
Tested as the only active extension? (incognito mode or another browser users):
Yes
Expected preferred behavior:
Toggling "Force Autoplay Off" to "On" should prevent autoplay but NOT prevent regular play triggered by the user clicking/tapping on the play button.
ImprovedTube Version
Version: 4.1325
Your Settings (From the Extension's ⋮-Hamburger menu > Settings > Backup & reset > Export settings)
Inaccessible - I went to "Backup & reset", granted the download permissions, and attempted to export my settings, but the extension froze/crashed after I pressed the "Ok" button on the confirmation dialog. Then I tried reloading and trying a second time, and I got the exact same freeze at the same place. Couldn't export the settings.
Your YouTube-Document
No response
OS / Device:
Name: Android Bitness: 32-bit Name: Firefox Version: 145.0 Platform: Linux armv81 Audio formats: mp3, mp4, AAC-LC, opus Video formats: H.264 Baseline Profile 3.0, H.264 Main Profile 4.0, vp9, av1 Java: false Cookies: false
No response
Same problem, but situation is more complex: I have multiple browsers(Firefox Developer, Desktop, Linux x86_64), with almost same config(I config them manually). I usually use same browser to watch YouTube, but not every browser has this problem. The playlist seem not has this problem. (picture-in-picture can bypass this problem)
I can also report that I've hit this problem. Firefox 145.0.2 on Windows 10
Strangely enough, when I tried to reproduce this problem in a Private tab for an abandoned attempt at opening a bug report, videos would play no matter if "Force Autoplay Off" was enabled or not.
Was trying to see if the problem was due to a conflict between ImproveTube and any other extensions I have that touch YouTube. That testing was inconclusive, even with all my extensions enabled in Private mode.
Edit: Further testing seems to indicate it only crops up when I am logged into YouTube. I used Mozilla's Multi-Account Containers extension to spin up a "Container" tab with me not being logged into YouTube. Videos still played just fine even with "Force Autoplay Off" enabled.
Based on other reports I've read, it's probably safe to assume this bug is highly variable, with no reliable "Universal" methods of reproduction, meaning a reliable method of reproducing it on one device will fail to trigger the bug on another.
The lack of a "Universal" way of triggering it makes finding the cause far more difficult.
