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YouTube blocks background video playback on Brave and other Browsers

https://piunikaweb.com/2026/01/28/youtube-background-play-samsung-internet-brave/
87•croes•2h ago

Comments

idrissbellil•1h ago
still works for me
Banditoz•1h ago
Not for long, probably.

I've noticed YouTube likes to A/B test a lot. If you use it signed out you pretty much get a new set of minor changes each time.

gethly•1h ago
I've noticed yesterday before and after update. So annoying. I so fucking hate Google and what they've become.
poulpy123•1h ago
Fuck google
jsilence•1h ago
This is so annoying.

Along the same line is that you can watch any hour long video without interruptions unless it is music where you will get interrupted every couple of minutes with "are you there?" dialogues.

keyle•1h ago
If this may help you, some browser allow youtube videos in PIP (e.g. Orion). That keeps the video going, you can scale it down in a corner.

Otherwise the other option is to drag the tab out to a window of its own, they can't know it's not visible, at least that works for Twitch ads.

politelemon•1h ago
Newpipe remains one of the best solutions for background playback. They do tend to move pretty quickly to patch "fixes" that YouTube throw in now and again. It's also useful for video backups if you need to preserve them for any reason.
Pooge•1h ago
yt-dlp is great if on desktop.
deafpolygon•1h ago
I do this, then send it to VLC on mobile.
Erenay09•50m ago
I am using Tubular, a NewPipe fork that has built-in SponsorBlock and ReturnYouTubeDislike features.
happymellon•28m ago
Why install additional software? Firefox hasn't broken for me only the Chrome clones.
Pooge•20m ago
Because modern websites are unusable on mobile; it's a feature and not a bug.
mhitza•28m ago
I'm a NewPipe user as well, unfortunately the experience is getting worse there too. Might be because I also use a VPN, but after every couple of videos I have to cooldown my usage until the IP block is reset.

This started happening for me a few weeks ago.

scns•26m ago
> It's also useful for video backups if you need to preserve them for any reason.

You can download only the soundpart as mp4 or opus too.

keepamovin•8m ago
I released a browserbox variant many years ago that could ensure background playback on YouTube. Despite multiple posts here and on PH, it never gained any traction. It seemed people were simply not interested in overcoming no background playback for free on every platform (including mobile).

Same time, one can appreciate the YouTube business: once you give something away for free, people absolutely loose their fucking minds if you make it paid. Once you set the bar to zero for payment, people will murder in the streets and despise you if you reasonably charge for what could have been a paid product all along. So there's a psychological blocker to switching on payment that people are ready to go to war for. It's the same blocker that cripples "open source" sustainability. People quickly develop an entitlement-callous, and feel cheated if you require payment instead of just continuing to surrender value to them.

It reminds of how a group of primates will kill a handler who gives cake to one, but not the group. This "free / paid" tension triggers some kind of deep-rooted human fairness wiring that is really tricky to extinguish once activated. That's why you should never open source your code and never give stuff away for free, if you plan to posslby make money from it somehow or make it paid in future. Because if you ever withhold the siphon of value related to ads or other 'you as a product' models, they will launch a jihad against you.

I think it's interesting how the human fairness reflex, often correct, breaks down in the context of "provider / consumer" dynamics. Even if the provider is not some "evil mega corp" but simply a solo software creator, people will still feel you are attempting to rob them of all dignity and debase their honor if you require payment for what was previously gratis.

Oh well. Live and learn, YouTube.

GvS•1m ago
I recommend PipePipe: https://github.com/InfinityLoop1308/PipePipe
hsbauauvhabzb•1h ago
Imagine trying to take a basic browser function we’ve all taken for granted for decades and attempt to paywall it as ‘Background playback is a feature intended to be exclusive for YouTube Premium members.’

Get fucked. I vote we remove API access to any focus state information.

Fuck you google.

laserlight•50m ago
It upsets me to see YouTube Premium apologists despite all the hostile moves by YouTube. YouTube Premium is an extortion scheme. When there are enough paying customers, YouTube Premium will begin showing ads to them. They won't forget sugarcoating ads as being “unobtrusive” or “environment-supporting” or whatever. But guess what? If you don't want to see them, you can upgrade to YouTube Premium Plus and continue being an apologist.
wiseowise•26m ago
But think how hard it is for them to earn money to make up for all the billions they’ve used to create de facto monopoly in video space? Won’t someone think of poor capitalists trying to squeeze the niche dry?
mschuster91•22m ago
> YouTube Premium is an extortion scheme.

One might also say it was unsustainable from the start, video is incredibly expensive to host and especially moderate.

All we're seeing right now is the beginning of the end of the ad-financed world. Someone has to pay the bills in the end and advertisement spending is on the way down, more and more of it is going to influencers/TTL instead of traditional ATL/BTL marketing.

xnx•1h ago
This will be a positive if browsers (extensions?) allow the ability to spoof visibility by site. Most websites have no business knowing if they're in the foreground or background.
touwer•53m ago
That's actually quite easy. onBlur, etc
reddalo•7m ago
Just to be precise, onBlur is a JavaScript event for an item that loses its focus, visibilitychange is what you actually need to detect tab changing.
madeofpalk•7m ago
Nice - you’ve just increased significantly power consumption of your browser!

Browsers will “slow down” various aspects of pages when they’re not visible, like animations or timers, to save on battery usage on laptops or phones.

Even if your remove explicit APIs for backgrounding, pages can still use heuristics to detect anyway.

chii•2m ago
The user should be making the choice - not the website. The website could be informed about being backgrounded, if the user chooses to. But the user should have the priority in the decision chain - their choice overrides any that the website makes.

That is what it means to have control over your own computing.

doe88•1h ago
There must be reaching a state where there must have more code for blocking all the stuffs there are trying to block than displaying videos. No wonder its UI feels bloated.
deafpolygon•1h ago
This is precisely why I don’t use YT anymore. On top of these scummy behaviour on Alphabets part… the content has taken a deep dive because more and more people are creating it for the “algorithm” and less for the content.
barnabee•51m ago
Background playback is a feature of the browser and operating system, not YouTube.

Consumer laws should prevent Google doing this. We need an anti-DMCA to make circumvention, bypassing, or disabling of user’s device or OS features illegal.

lmz•46m ago
Serving requests is a feature of Youtube and if they don't want to serve your client... well you didn't pay for it anyway.
VadimPR•31m ago
They corned the market, drove everyone out of it, and are now rent-seeking. Can't say you have much of a choice between youtube and any other video provider that has the same content on it.
reddalo•9m ago
>They corned the market, drove everyone out of it, and are now rent-seeking.

It's almost dumping [1]: they gave a service away for free (even if they were losing a lot of money) just to make it unfeasible for any other company to start a competing service.

Vimeo could have been a competitor, but then they pivoted to a professional market and now that Bending Spoons bought them [2], I'm not sure they will even have a future.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302

esperent•24m ago
The equivalent here is if Sony owned the most watched TV network (by far) and decided that it would work fully on Sony Bravia tvs. People with LG or Samsung TV's could only watch a degraded version.
redml•45m ago
i had that happen on firefox mobile months ago and installed video background play fix which all it does is stop sending the js hooks for when tab/window focus is lost. it was something clearly targeted to mobile browsers for people like me who don't bother with official apps anymore as they're riddled with antipatterns and ads. you can just youtube to the homepage like it's an app anyway.
Imustaskforhelp•44m ago
+N for video background play fix extension. Highly recommended on firefox.

This and ubo on android really make firefox a really great (the best imo) browser on android.

sfdlkj3jk342a•41m ago
Still working on IronFox (Firefox fork) on Android with the Video Background Fix extension.
kurito•39m ago
What a waste of resources. Imagine employing some of the most brilliant engineers on the planet and allocating man-hours towards artificially worsening the experience for your userbase in order to blackmail them into paying you, and giving them back what they had in the first place.

At least this is a loosing game for Google, since this is client side behaviour.

Ampersander•24m ago
Aren't they going to win in the long run with remote attestation?
nikanj•24m ago
*Allocating man-hours towards making sure that users actually pay for the service they're using, either via youtube subscription or ads
saagarjha•22m ago
Monetizing a basic OS feature is not a good look.
realusername•20m ago
Maybe if the Youtube subscription wasn't 10x what they earn from a single user with ads, that would be more believable option.
BrenBarn•20m ago
If they wanted users to pay for the service they're using they should never have made YouTube free in the first place.
reddalo•13m ago
They made it free just like any other startup makes a free tier to obtain market share.
anonymous908213•9m ago
Google is the richest company literally on the entire planet, you really don't need to go to bat for monopolistic practices.
tjpnz•19m ago
No worse than what a lot of their other "brilliant" minds are working on - ads.
jy14898•18m ago
While I'm not pro YouTube, I think it's fine for companies to decide how to monetise their product, including things which were originally free. If you don't like free services, stop using them
reddalo•13m ago
>If you don't like free services, stop using them

Problem is, there's no real alternative for YouTube. It's a monopoly.

sneak•10m ago
That’s not remotely true.
reddalo•5m ago
Okay, so list which websites I can use to watch all kinds of content that I can find on YouTube.

Vimeo? It's basically dead. DailyMotion? It could've been an alternative, but they've recently deleted most old videos. Peertube? Nice idea in theory, but lack of content.

tjpnz•12m ago
Is this product or hampering the way the web works with video? Go to any other site with a <video> tag and you won't face similar issues.
keepamovin•16m ago
Maybe ads-as-business-model is like political ideology - it is not a human universal but must adapt to the place: for instance collectivism over individualism in East Asia, theocratic conservatism over democracy in Afghanistan -- maybe ads as business model is despicable to some regions, but accepted in others? Albania it's apparently illegal for YouTube to serve ads?
latexr•12m ago
> Imagine employing some of the most brilliant engineers on the planet

Maybe we should stop with that tired fallacious rhetoric? Just because you work at a massive company doesn’t make you “brilliant”.

speedylight•36m ago
On iOS you can get free background play with Youtube App by putting the video in picture-in-picture -> locking the screen, -> going to control center and hitting the play button. Don’t let Google know!
baxtr•31m ago
If you’re on iOS, put the video on full screen and then put Safari in the background. Next, press play in the Control Center. This should now allow the audio to play in the background.
p4bl0•24m ago
What a shame. What's the point even? I'm not going subscribe to YouTube premium anyway, and even less install and use the YouTube app. What happens with this move is just that I will just use YouTube less. I believe that's the case for most people who chose to use YouTube in a browser precisely for background playback.
nikanj•23m ago
The point is that youtube is an ad-funded service, and if you're not watching the ads, Google is losing money on you.
wazoox•12m ago
Bwaaa an evil monopolistic empire won't get our money, that's so sad really. They're racking up tens of billions of money every quarter, we don't. I carefully do my best not to give any money to Microsoft, Google and the likes. They must be dismantled anyway.
renewiltord•10m ago
Perhaps that's what they desire. Serving YouTube video has marginal cost and you provide marginal zero value. Losing you as a customer is probably desired.
ed_mercer•7m ago
Will someone _please_ make a decent linux phone already so we can stop this nonsense.
sevenzero•5m ago
You're free to do so, probably your million dollar idea right there.

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