Ask HN: New YouTube player not working in Firefox

I have noticed weird look of youtube on my *phone* yesterday. Today, I cannot play a single video on my *computer* when I use firefox. But when i switch to chrome-based browser, it plays just fine.

It is not adblock issue and has been like this the whole day.

Anyone else experiencing these issues? I saw some reddit posts but they span across multiple days, so I would think this was short outage from few days ago, but it looks like is is not and likely google trying to F with firefox again, like they like to do.

3 points | by gethly 20 hours ago

4 comments

  • krst252009 5 hours ago
    Yes, this issue is real and affecting many Firefox users — YouTube videos show a black screen or error message, while working fine in Chrome. It’s not adblock-related, and likely tied to how YouTube’s new player interacts with Firefox’s rendering engine.

    What’s Happening YouTube’s new player rollout seems to be causing playback failures in Firefox.

    Users report:

    Black screen or “An error occurred” message

    Videos not loading at all

    UI glitches on mobile and desktop

    Chrome-based browsers (Brave, Edge, etc.) work fine — suggesting a compatibility issue, not a network or account problem. What You Can Try Clear Firefox cache and cookies

    Corrupted data can block video rendering.

    Disable hardware acceleration

    Go to Settings > General > Performance and uncheck “Use recommended performance settings.”

    Try Firefox in Safe Mode

    Launch with extensions disabled to rule out conflicts.

    Switch to YouTube’s mobile site temporarily

    Use m.youtube.com — it often bypasses player issues.Use an alternate browser until fixed

    Chrome, Brave, or Edge are working normally.

    [-]
    • gethly 2 hours ago
      Only the incognito mode works, nothing else. Makes no sense to me. It's the second day now. Not sure if I should be angry with Google(likely) or Firefox for this. The main problem seems to be that some googlevideo.com subdomains are returning 403 errors. Strange thing is that in normal mode, the rr5 subdomain is called and returns the 403 but in incognito mode rr3 is called and that returns content just fine. I have no clue what picks the subdomains from which the videos are streamed.
  • Bender 17 hours ago
    Try 140.4.0 ESR as a work around to give them time to figure out what they broke unless you depend on a feature in 144. [1] Works for me on Linux and Windows. Or try starting 144 in safe mode to disable all addons as a test.

    [1] - https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/140.4.0esr/

    [-]
    • gethly 16 hours ago
      I signed out, flushed all data, disabled all extension but it did not help.

      Incognito mode works though..

      Hmm.. in normal mode, I see that https://rr5---sn-t0a7ln7d.googlevideo.com is called but gets ns_error_unknown_host but in incognito mode rr5 is not called and all works. Changing to dns over https did not help. But I heard about the AWS outage today and that it has something to do with DNS so i think there's the issue. Though am not sure why incognito works.

      [-]
      • Bender 16 hours ago
        The only other thing I could suggest is use the web console network tab to see what requests may be hanging or timing out when not in Incognito mode.
  • glenstein 20 hours ago
    Works for me on Firefox for Android with version 143.0.4. And I just updated to 144.0 and tried again, and that is working also.
    [-]
    • gethly 20 hours ago
      Phone is not a problem, desktop is.
      [-]
      • glenstein 19 hours ago
        Just had a chance to try version 144.0 for desktop on Windows, and that's working for me also.
  • samoit 20 hours ago
    I also have problems with Firefox. I guess it is something Google related...