1847295 - Stop rewriting YouTube Flash embeds

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, task)

Description

[Gregory Pappas [:gregp]]

This mechanism was added in bug 769117.

It works by hacking nsObjectLoadingContent to check if an <object> or <embed> is trying to load a URL whose base domain is youtube.com or youtube-nocookie.com and path starts with /v/. If true, the URL is rewritten to start with /embed/ instead of /v/ and the MIME type is set to text/html.

It was done this way because at the time, there was a need to completely avoid the plugin loading path. Less invasive solutions like a built-in extension didn't work because the plugin would always load before the extension. It was also hard to prevent the doorhanger warning about missing Flash from appearing.

These days, none of those concerns apply! A webcompat intervention written in JavaScript would work.

Telemetry for this mechanism is long gone, but according to this comment from qdot:

Our firefox telemetry had it at somewhere around 1% of users also when we implemented embed rewriting. It's now down to about 0.5% on our release branch.

That was five years ago. Presumably, usage is even lower now.

Comment 1

[Gregory Pappas [:gregp]]

See bug 1874833 comment 3