1189687 - Cannot play YouTube videos inside the browser

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[u529383]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/44.0.2403.125 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Tested with versions 39 and 42

Open any YouTube video, tap to start playing. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRWUoDpo2fo


Actual results:

Tapping to start playing opens the YouTube android application


Expected results:

It should play the video inside the Firefox browser as it is very well capabale of doing.

For example, opening any embed YouTube video plays correctly on any of the Firefox versions. If you open the following link it will be play correctly inside the Firefox browser: https://www.youtube.com/embed/NRWUoDpo2fo

I would appreciate to be informed of any decision regarding this issue so that I can continue working on an add-on for Firefox Android which depends on this subject to be resolved.

The default Android, Chrome and Opera browsers all play the videos correctly, none of them not open the YouTube app when tapping to play.

Firefox for Android is the only one that opens the YouTube app instead of playing the video inside the browser.

Comment 1

[u529383]

Forgot to add that this has been tested with Android 4.4.2, running on LG G3

Comment 2

[Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian; :pocmo)]

I can confirm this using a Nexus 9 (Android 5.1.1). Personally I like this behavior but I can see that this being the default is not really what we want.

Comment 3

[u529383]

(In reply to Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian) from comment #2)
> I can confirm this using a Nexus 9 (Android 5.1.1). Personally I like this
> behavior but I can see that this being the default is not really what we
> want.

Firefox already offers a shortcut to open the current link with an associated app (whenever possible), the android head in the url bar: https://support.cdn.mozilla.net/media/uploads/images/2013-11-13-17-46-09-826a39.png

Having both the icon and the player doing exactly the same thing is redundant and denies completely the possibility for the user to play the video in the browser. This is not an ideal scenario for users that do not want to use the YouTube app to play videos or that have uninstalled it.

As it stands, and ever since flash has been dropped in favor of HTML5 in YouTube, no Firefox Android user is capable of playing YouTube videos unless these videos are embedded.

Comment 4

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

Bug 1174784 might be relevant here.

Comment 5

[:Margaret Leibovic]

Bug 1153087 is also relevant.

Comment 6

[bug.zilla]

This suggests it's a User Agent issue:
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/3dxfac/android_firefox_and_youtube_videos/ctan8qh

There's an add on (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/enable-youtube-player-mobile/) but since firefox offers a choice to launch the video in the app (the "android head"), then videos should start playing in the browser automatically (as is the case with stock).

Comment 7

[u529383]

(In reply to bug.zilla from comment #6)
> This suggests it's a User Agent issue:
> https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/3dxfac/
> android_firefox_and_youtube_videos/ctan8qh
> 
> There's an add on
> (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/enable-youtube-player-mobile/
> ) but since firefox offers a choice to launch the video in the app (the
> "android head"), then videos should start playing in the browser
> automatically (as is the case with stock).

That was my debugging, but ever since I posted that the workaround is not working anymore, it throws the mimetype error when trying to play any video.

Comment 8

[BMO Automation]

We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.