Mozilla has rolled out an update for the Firefox browser, taking it to version 127.0.2. This update successfully rectifies a persistent problem affecting YouTube video playback that Mozilla says originated from YouTube’s side, rather than an issue within the Firefox browser itself.
For quite some time, a number of Firefox users have been experiencing frequent interruptions when trying to watch videos on YouTube. The exact count of affected individuals has not been disclosed. Our previous article, published a week ago, explored this issue in detail.
Main Takeaways:
- Disruptions occurred during playback of normal and live YouTube videos, though not always.
- Only videos that were using the vp9 codec at 1080p resolution or higher suffered from this hiccup.
- Those who encountered the bug were stuck on a buffering screen that wouldn’t go away.
Mozilla was actively following two major bug reports concerning this matter. They included bug 1900191, related to live video streaming, and bug 1878510, which pertained to the general video playback on YouTube.
The Mozilla team spent considerable time investigating as they initially faced difficulties replicating the issue, even when trying to access the specific setback videos on YouTube.
After thorough research, Mozilla’s own engineer, Alastor Wu, zeroed in on the cause. Wu unearthed that YouTube was dispatching corrupted combined VP9 streams. He made a connection between troubled video fragments from YouTube and previously transmitted fragments, creating a collision that led to Firefox’s calculations for the upcoming video fragments to fail, resulting in endless buffering. All the details of Wu’s investigation can be found through this provided link.
The release notes for Firefox highlight: “We’ve resolved an issue where YouTube videos may freeze under certain circumstances.”
Conclusion
Mozilla hasn’t explained why browsers that are built on the Chromium platform were unaffected by this flaw. This could potentially be tied to the difference in how these browsers handle errors. Ultimately, only Firefox and its related browsers faced this particular playback problem.
For Firefox users troubled by this issue, it’s advised to update the browser to the latest version to eliminate the problem.
On a desktop, the most straightforward method to update Firefox is by navigating through the Firefox Menu, selecting Help, and clicking on About Firefox. This action will display the current version and will automatically search for and install any updates.
Earlier this month, Mozilla introduced Firefox version 127, which included a few modest modifications and bolstered security features.
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