844414 - m.youtube.com requires the YouTube app for playback (port bug 705572)

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[ksjunkmail]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Tablet; rv:20.0) Gecko/20.0 Firefox/20.0
Build ID: 20130219042021

Steps to reproduce:

go to m.youtube.com and try and play a video.


Actual results:

you get a message box titled "open application."  the text with in the message box says "this link needs to be opened with an application." there is a cancel and ok button. clicking ok doesn't play the video.


Expected results:

video should play

Comment 1

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

The Kindle Fire HD does not ship with the YouTube application which YouTube expects is expecting our browser to carry-forward with their playback requests to handle playback into their viewer. One thing you can try is to install the Phony add-on and try different user-agents along-side installing Flash if that is all possible on your Kindle Fire HD.

Comment 2

[ksjunkmail]

the default browser on the kindle fire can play. other browsers can play too.

Comment 3

[Yves Dessertine]

Tested on FF 19.0 official and nightly 22.0a1 (2013-02-25). It works with Phony (when selecting "Android (Phone)").

Looks like a clear evidence of user agent detection. I would suggest here:
  Whiteboard: 	[website-compatibility], [short-list]
  Product: 	Tech Evangelism
  Blocks: 	google-evangelism

Like #668275

Comment 4

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

This was fixed in bug 705572 for XUL Fennec on the Kindle Fire. Looks like the code is still present. Do we still use it?

Comment 5

[Brad Lassey [:blassey] (use needinfo?)]

No, we don't use it. Wouldn't be hard to move it over if we ever shipped to the kindle fire again.

Comment 6

[ksjunkmail]

please ship to kindle fire fire again. default brower on fire hd 8.9 is horrible.

Comment 7

[Brad Lassey [:blassey] (use needinfo?)]

The problem is that Amazon repacks and resigns our APK to include some of their own software, which is unacceptable to Mozilla. This is being tracked by bug 713777.

Comment 8

[Markus S.]

Whatever Amazon does is not the point here. The bug also applies to all other Android variants as well: Previous didn't require the YouTube app, now FF does. That's a regression.

Comment 10

[chris.b.blay]

I'm trying to reproduce this on a rooted Nexus 7 running Lollipop. I've uninstalled YouTube completely and installed Firefox 37.0.1. If I go to https://m.youtube.com/ and try to watch a video it's a little odd but at least works.

First tap takes me to the regular watch page, then when I tap the video to play it loads a desktop embed player (this part is weird - normally I'd expect playback to happen inline on the watch page), then I tap the embed player and it starts playing. It's not a super-great experience since the player isn't really meant for use on mobile but it's something. Seeking is busted but that seems more like a separate MSE issue in FireFox.

Maybe I'm not recreating the environment correctly? Is there supposed to be some fake YouTube app that registers to receive mobile YouTube intents? Perhaps Nexus 7 gets special treatment from YouTube? Or has this been fixed some other way in FireFox already?

Comment 11

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

I think we fixed this with Bug 936851.

Yes, it's odd that the player opens in a new window, but it seems to work well enough as a fallback. We can file a new bug for that if you feel strongly about it, but I think this one's done.