[RESOLVED] Problem with YouTube videos if cookies disabled

[Ian]

Hello.
Sorry for my bad English.

probably a bug, but I'm not sure:
Youtube and related (ytimg) whitelisted permanently.
YT cookies disabled.

NS Options -> embeddings tab : `Apply these restrictions to whitelisted sites too` - enabled, other options are also enabled.(Except ask for confirm.)
Options -> advanced -> Untrusted : all options checked
Options -> advanced -> Trusted : all options unchecked
All other options - defaults.

If I click the placeholder icon, related to blocked video, blocked video is unblocked and starts playing.
But if YT cookies disabled it works only if video type is flash (placeholder icon with flash logo) If video type is other than flash (VP8 or any others, i don`t know)
pressing the placeholder icon just reload the page and not unblock video.
If YT cookies enabled all works fine with all videos.
Tested on clean FF Profile without any extesions installed
NS ver. 2.2.3. ,FF ver. 8.0.1. OS WinXP SP3 x86.

[therube]

URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3np0DMxXKzM&feature=topvideos_music&html5=True

Confirmed.

If you disable NoScript, with cookies still blocked, the clip will play (though it may require a page refresh before doing so).

With NoScript enabled & cookies blocked (& other settings as outlined above), can't seem to be able to force it to play.

Nothing (of note) in Error Console.

---

To also note, while testing this, YouTube html5 activation sends page into permanent loading may be happening "semi-permanently" (as in a refresh may resolve it).

[Testing]

Confirmed-ish.
Subset of above is :
Cookies enabled, Third-party cookies disabled.
All other settings as for OP

Video won't load.
But, after 3rd party cookies toggled "on", and video is loaded:

Toggle 3rd party cookies "off" (cache and cookies cleared before each toggle) doesn't prevent video loading.
Toggle all cookies "off" does prevent video loading.
Then any subsequent toggling of 3rd party cookies only doesn't prevent video loading.

Is control of 3rd party cookies getting subverted again? This html5 is certainly powerful.

[Tom T.]

There was a recent thread that YT has a new script,
youtube-nocookie.com, that might be required (temp-allow, at least) when cookies are disabled.

Does this fix it?

[Ian]

No, adding youtube-nocookie.com to whitelist does not resolve this issue (at least in my case).

[Tom T.]

A while back, I removed youtube.com and ytimg.com from the whitelist.
With YT cookies not allowed, no problem at the linked video in therube's post. Click Flash block-logo, (I do have the confirm prompt), and it loads and plays.

Perhaps "old, unimproved" Fx 3.6.24 is not harmed by HTML5? Will try on "new, improved" Fx 8.01 and report.

[Tom T.]

On Win XP, Fx 8.01, NS 2.2.3., *all* Embeddings checked, Untrusted checked. YT cookies forbidden.

TA youtube.com and ytimg.com. NS Flash-block logo appears. Clicking it and confirming is useless, as NS block-logo reappears. So don't bother.
New "blocked object" shows in NS Menu.
TA'd

Code: Select all

*@http://o-o.preferred.mia05s03.v5.lscache2.c.youtube.com. (http://www.youtube.com)

Now the video loads and plays, still without a cookie. Success.

NOTE: The random-type strings in the *@http ... etc. seem to change upon reloads. Just look for the ones that don't contain video/ogg.

Old YT help info that may be relevant:
http://www.youtube.com/html5

Supported Browsers

We support browsers that support both the video tag in HTML5 and either the h.264 video codec or the WebM format (with VP8 codec). These include:

Firefox 4 (WebM, Available here)

Perhaps using 3.6.x forces some type of fallback Flash vs HTML5 audio/video tags and the specified codecs?

Summary:
On Fx 3.6.24, no problem with all script and cookies disabled. TA Flash block-logo = success.
On Fx 8.01, must TA or whitelist youtube.com and ytimg.com, then allow *from menu* (not logo) blocked object *@http etc., but not video/ogg.

Conclusion: (Note to self: Start keeping actual list) Reason #160 to stay on Fx 3.6.x as long as possible.

ETA: @ Testing: Third-party cookies have always been disabled on this browser, starting with Fx 2.x, and always will be. Wasn't a factor in the above sequence.

[Tom T.]

TINFOIL-HATTED USER WITH ULTRA-LOCKDOWNS. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME.

Just for the (ironic) laughs, went to the same link (@ therube), with Fx 2.0.0.20.
No scripting, no cookies, all Embeddings checked.
Click the NS Flash-block logo, and starts to load and play instantly, as it always has.

[soapbox]
Not saying we should go back to Fx 2.x, just that "perhaps" MZ should reconsider some of the "features", "improvements", and other changes made since then.
Keep the ones that actually make things better (IMHO, none of them), and toss the rest (IMHO, all of them).

Have seen claimed improvements in speed. Benchmarking all three with speedtest, at about the same time of day (to avoid different levels of ISP, Internet, and server congestion) shows no statistically-significant difference.

Most speed differences claimed seem to be in rendering JavaScript. We're here because we allow as little JS as possible.
More speed "improvement" comes from link-prefetching, and also from speculative HTML parsing in Fx 4+, both of which may be significant privacy risks.

Color rendering is said to be improved. OK. On a laptop, I can't really tell the difference.

Footprint up about 50% from 2 to 3, been more than doubled from 2 to 8. For what?
[/soapbox]

[dhouwn]

Have seen claimed improvements in speed. Benchmarking all three with speedtest, at about the same time of day (to avoid different levels of ISP, Internet, and server congestion) shows no statistically-significant difference.

You are talking about measuring linear line speed, i.e. how quick a single data-stream runs? If yes than that's no surprise, it would been quite an issue if Firefox somehow limited this.

We're here because we allow as little JS as possible.

Not sure I agree, NoScript is (i.a.) about controlling JS but not necessarily about running "as little JS as possible".

More speed "improvement" comes from link-prefetching, and also from speculative HTML parsing in Fx 4+, both of which may be significant privacy risks.

There is also DNS-prefetching, quite a lot of networking improvements (see http://www.browserscope.org/?category=network) like changes allowing for more resources to be loaded simultaneously. Also things that might improve latency like forcing Nagle's algorithm off. Also, caching for SSL content.

Color rendering is said to be improved. OK. On a laptop, I can't really tell the difference.

Huh? Are you talking the iCC profiles in images? Well, I would guess that you won't find that many images on the web that are displayed in Firefox with colour correction for various reasons (AFAIK, Firefox just has some half-heartedly support for a ICCv2).

Footprint up about 50% from 2 to 3, been more than doubled from 2 to 8. For what?

[/quote]Mostly JS I would guess (currently my about:memory tells me that JS accounts for about half of all explicit allocations). Other reasons might include more aggressive caching (sometimes less though) and if you have it hardware acceleration if you have it enabled. Not sure about the HTML5 parser/dom but I can't exclude it also consuming more than the old ones (I remember reading a blog post from an Opera developers who talked about this how it did in Opera's case).
BTW, I believe you might see even lower memory usage with Firefox 1.5 and 3, former because it does less caching (which is why Firefox 2 was considered a memory hog at its time) and latter because they actively tried to the reduce the memory usage compared to Firefox 2.

[therube]

FF 3.6, FF 2.x, aren't doing HTML5 (are they), so using those to test shows nothing (& you would expect that Youtube would fall back to Flash in those cases) & the OP was talking about clips in other then Flash format.

Allowing any of the Blocked Objects (other then the topmost), does allow the clip to play.

[tlu]

With NoScript enabled & cookies blocked (& other settings as outlined above), can't seem to be able to force it to play.

Not here. With youtube.com and ytimg.com whitelisted and cookies blocked (with CookieMonster) all videos play without a problem.

[Ian]

Not here. With youtube.com and ytimg.com whitelisted and cookies blocked (with CookieMonster) all videos play without a problem.

Maybe it depends on the browser version. Have you tested it on version 8.0.1. ?
Today I re-checked again and nothing has changed.

On Win XP, Fx 8.01, NS 2.2.3., *all* Embeddings checked, Untrusted checked. YT cookies forbidden.

TA youtube.com and ytimg.com. NS Flash-block logo appears. Clicking it and confirming is useless, as NS block-logo reappears. So don't bother.
New "blocked object" shows in NS Menu.
TA'd

Code: Select all

*@http://o-o.preferred.mia05s03.v5.lscache2.c.youtube.com. (http://www.youtube.com)

Now the video loads and plays, still without a cookie. Success.

NOTE: The random-type strings in the *@http ... etc. seem to change upon reloads. Just look for the ones that don't contain video/ogg.

I agree. I see these blocked objects on the NS `Blocked Objects` menu. Enabling these objects allows video playback.
But blocked objects may be different for different videos (and/or different browser sessions, or something else), and need to be unblocked manually every time when NS block it
Maybe I misunderstood the logic of NS.
I just thought that if blocked objects from YT domain and this domain is whitelisted, they should not be blocked
If it is normal NS behaviour (Manually unblocking from NS menu instead of icon clicking on blocked video ), If this is not a bug, then I have no more questions about this.

[ConfirmedUbuntu]

I just thought that if blocked objects from YT domain and this domain is whitelisted, they should not be blocked

This is correct - if you have not chosen "apply these restrictions to whitelisted sites too" in the Embeddings tab in the preferences.
However, if you have chosen "apply these restrictions to whitelisted sites too", then you should expect to see a clickable placeholder and not have to use the NS list of blocked objects to release the object to play. In your example, after you click on the first placeholder, you should expect to see another placeholder if another object is called in response to the first one - and not have it only shown on the NS menu.
Your assumption in your first post is correct: the normal behaviour of NS is to show a placeholder for all blocked objects. There are always a few edge cases where the page source makes it difficult for NS to insert a placeholder, but for Youtube I think that the developer would like to keep the behaviour of showing placeholders always when the user asks for them --- it would seriously confuse new users, let alone us longtime users

Judging from the varied responses in this thread, it seems that there is some quite buggy behaviour at youtube.
Confirming your report:
new clean defaults, latest development as at today - your NS setting changes, cookies globally blocked - placeholder click - on the example provided by therube - does not release the video, but it is in the NS menu and can be released that route.

Cookies globally allowed - video releases at first click.

NS disabled - video releases at first click with cookies globally allowed and with cookies globally blocked.

NS doesn't display the tooltip information for the video, which it usually does for blocked objects.
Interesting.
Is this normal behaviour for html5 video objects other than flash? I don't get to enough pages these days to know what's the norm with the new rendering.

[ConfirmedUbuntu]

Oops - for NS disabled, of course I didn't have any placeholder to click.

[Ian]

This is correct - if you have not chosen "apply these restrictions to whitelisted sites too" in the Embeddings tab in the preferences.
However, if you have chosen "apply these restrictions to whitelisted sites too", then you should expect to see a clickable placeholder and not have to use the NS list of blocked objects to release the object to play.

I know it. That's what I meant. I just made ​​a mistake in the previous post and did not correct it, because the problem described in 1-st post.

Confirming your report:
new clean defaults, latest development as at today - your NS setting changes, cookies globally blocked - placeholder click - on the example provided by therube - does not release the video, but it is in the NS menu and can be released that route.

Yes, with NS ver. 2.2.4rc1. situation has not changed.
As a temporary solution i change cookie settings for YT from rejected to allowed for session,it's easier (although less safely) than every time allow blocked objects from NS menu.