[RESOLVED] Problem with YouTube videos if cookies disabled

[ConfirmedUbuntu]

@Ian - Good. Now the bug is clear, I think it's up to the mods to maybe move this thread to the development forum for the dev's attention?

[Tom T.]

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.

Not sure exactly what the tests are, but it's definitely not a single data-stream, as the speedometer fluctuates during the test period. I take that to mean that they're throwing different types of d/l and u/l material at the machine. It's a service branded by my ISP, but is based on http://www.ookla.com/speedtest (their logo shows on the page). If you want to attach your packet sniffer or whatever and examine the test material, I'm sure we'd all love to see exactly what types of things they're benchmarking.

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".

It is for me , but let me restrict the generalization somewhat: We're here because we don't want to allow every JS on the planet. Most sites come with so much 3rd-party garbage, ranging from useless to annoying to privacy-invasive to possibly dangerous, that even a somewhat more relaxed attitude toward JS is still going to reduce the total amount of JS the browser has to render, versus without NoScript or some other (usually, less selective) form of blocking.

So I still maintain that the speed value of faster JS rendering, while real (because we need it for our trusted or TA'd sites) is greatly diluted by a selective approach as to what scripting to allow.

btw, I'm a firm believer in the Principle of Least Privilege. Even if there isn't a safety risk (how can you be sure?), why waste the bandwidth, memory, CPU cycles, etc.?

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.

Some day, I'll get a stopwatch and try to compare page-load times, etc. on all three branches. (Or not.) IMHO, the other factors: congestion of ISP, Internet pipelines, and destination server are enough to hide any perceptible gains. Admittedly, my usage is probably lower than the average user's: I''m on the computer many hours a day, but doing relatively low-resource things, like e-mail, this forum... I'm not an online gamer, don't d/l feature-length movies, etc. Which is a good reason for Fx to maintain the two branches: whatever they can safely do for the gamers and movie fans, while keeping the simpler version in which YouTube works without all of the hassles described here. IMHO. YMMV.

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).

I'm talking about everything I see on the screen. ... and while we're on the subject of color, gray balloons on a gray background, and black text on a dark gray background, are *really* bad choices, assuming that they wish to appeal to anyone over 30. F2 and F3 were much easier on the eyes for that demographic.

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

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.

I used "footprint" in terms of "HD space consumed", and to a slightly lesser degree, number of files, each of which requires a 1k entry in the MFT, and adds to backup time and size. Or adding a 10+MB new file, xul.dll, in F3, while F2 seemed to get along just fine without it.

Caching is user-configurable, so no complaint there.
[rant]I just see very little *tangible, visible* benefit from Fx 4+, with many negatives. Like this thread and YouTube... and many others. [/rant]

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)

Problem solved.

& the OP was talking about clips in other then Flash format.

I haven't actually seen any there, though my visits are not frequent. If you can point me to one in another format, I'll be happy to do a test case. But they don't do Apple QuickTime, do they? ... what other formats are there at YT?

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

.
My point was that on Fx 3.6, those scripts can remain blocked, along with cookies, and there is *still no issue*. Fx 8.01 is what complicated things.
See above reply to dhouwn re: in general, the less allowed, the better, IMHO.

@ Ian: With Fx 3.6, there's no trade-off to make. We can have our cake and eat it, too. But for Fx Newer, it quickly becomes second-nature to open the menu, point to BO, and recognize the pattern, as mentioned. BTW, do you have NS Menu set to open on mouseover versus having to click to open? Two seconds to get the video playing, without the cookie.

However, I don't think the cookie method is less safe; only a privacy issue. That privacy issue can be removed by deleting the cookie before going elsewhere. Either manually; using various add-ons (tlu mentioned Cookie Monster); close/restart the browser; maybe write a little batch script that empties cookies with two clicks, (I did that for LSO's, a/k/a Flash Cookies, a/k/a "Personally Identifiable Elements", a/k/a "PIE", a nice pun on "Cookie", because there was some discontent with the add-on that did this.) or other ways.

Cheers - Tom

[Tom T.]

@Ian - Good. Now the bug is clear, I think it's up to the mods to maybe move this thread to the development forum for the dev's attention?

Sorry, your one-liner was missed in the somewhat O/T discussion that ensued.

I agree that clicking the block-logo should be enough to allow the video, (cough) as it still does in Fx 3.6.24 (cough).

No need to move it -- I'll PM Giorgio and ask if this simple, click-the-logo can be put back into the newer browsers.
(FWIW, he monitors all forums, not just Dev, subject only to the time constraints of being a one-man band. )

[BBCiPlayer]

Same condition appears using BBC iplayer
Test url:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0 ... 0_12_2011/

Using new clean profile, NS 2.2.4RC2
Options|Embeddings|Apply these restrictions to whitelisted sites too
Temp Allow bbc.co.uk,bbcimg.co.uk
Choose above link, no placeholder is made.
Choose Temp Allow the flash player from NS blocked objects menu
Player then shows the program.

Reverting to NS 2.2.3 - downloaded from AMO -
All settings as above
Choose above link and placeholder is made as usual
Click on placeholder and program shows.

Note that you need to access BBC iPlayer with a UK IP.

[Tom T.]

<snipped for brevity in reply>
Same condition appears using BBC iplayer
Using new clean profile, NS 2.2.4RC2
Choose above link, no placeholder is made.
Choose Temp Allow the flash player from NS blocked objects menu
Player then shows the program.

Reverting to NS 2.2.3 - downloaded from AMO -
All settings as above
Choose above link and placeholder is made as usual
Click on placeholder and program shows.

Interesting. But everyone else in this thread seemed to experience the symptom on NS 2.2.3. Including myself, though only on Fx 8.01.
Fx 3.6.24 was immune.

Note that you need to access BBC iPlayer with a UK IP.

I don't have that, but I'm sure Giorgio does, and I know at least one other Moderator who has proxies in several countries east of the Pond.

In any event, I did send Giorgio a message about 24 hours ago. Please understand that his priorities (quite rightly, I'm sure you'll agree) are dealing with genuine security threats first, and also, to bring the much-awaited NS 3.0 to the desktop. This issue is indeed an inconvenience, and should be fixed, but I'm sure we all understand that the others have higher priorities.

Thank you for the additional report, and for your patience.

[BBCiPlayer]

Never a problem to wait, I'm just adding the report for the bug tracking, not for a quick fix. Impatience with Giorgio!? The very thought amuses me.
He's the most proactive developer bar none!

For the triage if you want to moderate this into its own thread, I forgot to add that my cookies settings had no effect on the non-display of the placeholder using V 2.2.4RC2. No placeholder displayed either with or without cookies accepted.

Using V2.2.3 from AMO, cookies settings had no effect. A placeholder displayed with or without cookies accepted, and the video played at first click of the placeholder.

I just tested the player performance with NS disabled in both versions. It's fine without NS.

Also exhausted Temp Allow variations by Temp Allowing All.
Makes no difference to either version's results as I reported above.

Hey Giorgio! afdads' widget on noscript.net just asked me to download Chrome - ha! the nerve of those upstarts hehe.

[BBciPlayer]

And I do note that the BBC example is Flash - makes this not exactly the same bug at all. Oh well, it's reported as best I could.
I'll leave it in your capable hands now.

[tlu]

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.

No problems here with 8.0 either.

[GµårÐïåñ]

I didn't want to jump into this as I felt it had enough people going back and forth on it, I didn't need to include myself. However, for the sake of actually evaluating the issue, I tried it and no issue as described.

I tried with 8.x on Win7 and also on Ubuntu 11.x and using the latest NS is a given. So not able to reproduce it and I have read through the painfully "busy" thread from the beginning to make sure I didn't miss anything.

[Tom T.]

CALLING ALL GEEKS: Only very slightly 0/T, and actually related: The use of nocookie when the YT vid is embedded in a third-party site.

I posted a copy of the script, youtube-nocookie.com, at that thread.
It looks harmless to me. Anyone who wants to double-check, please take a peek.

Also, being the Luddite still on Fx 3.6.x for all use except to check issues here, I'm still climbing the curve on HTML5, so there were a couple of questions for the H5 uber-crowd. All answers appreciated. TIA.

And will check *this* topic's issue on Fx 8.01 and see if indeed resolved. Back shortly.

[Tom T.]

Win XP, Fx 8.01, NS 2.2.4rc2.

ALL scripting blocked from YouTube and its relatives; cookies blocked. Video shows block-logo, clicking/confirm = loads and plays.

So this issue was resolved, either by YT, or by something in NS?

(sorry for the delay -- had to ban some spammers).

[BBCiPlayer]

My report upthread
http://forums.informaction.com/viewtopi ... =15#p33493
definitely doesn't belong in this one.
I've added my report to the appropriate thread.
http://forums.informaction.com/viewtopi ... 552#p33552

[Ian]

Win XP, Fx 8.01, NS 2.2.4rc2.

ALL scripting blocked from YouTube and its relatives; cookies blocked. Video shows block-logo, clicking/confirm = loads and plays.

So this issue was resolved, either by YT, or by something in NS?

(sorry for the delay -- had to ban some spammers).

I rechecked today.
For me, the situation has not changed, regardless of YT whitelisting, tested with disabled too (with disabled YT & relatives - not appears placeholder on player)
Proof (YT and related domains enabled as default NS whitelist, other NS settings - such as I wrote in my 1-st post): http://www.mediafire.com/?b65qdhawz4fid2y 4.9MB,7min.

UPD. NS ver. 2.2.4.rc3.,exactly same situation: http://www.mediafire.com/?3pdz2rtm3dxncq4

[Tom T.]

Win XP, Fx 8.01, NS 2.2.4rc2.
ALL scripting blocked from YouTube and its relatives; cookies blocked. Video shows block-logo, clicking/confirm = loads and plays.
So this issue was resolved, either by YT, or by something in NS?

I rechecked today.
For me, the situation has not changed, regardless of YT whitelisting, tested with disabled too (with disabled YT & relatives - not appears placeholder on player)
Proof (YT and related domains enabled as default NS whitelist, other NS settings - such as I wrote in my 1-st post): http://www.mediafire.com/?b65qdhawz4fid2y 4.9MB,7min.

UPD. NS ver. 2.2.4.rc3.,exactly same situation: http://www.mediafire.com/?3pdz2rtm3dxncq4

I believe you. Don't have time to watch the vids right now, but it's weird. We're both on XP, same Firefox (I'm back on F3 now, but it worked on Fx 8.01); same NS dev build (before you updated.) I have entire Embeddings page checked, including "Apply to whitelisted".

IIUC, *regardless* of whether YT script is allowed (by "relatives", I meant ytimg.com and youtube-nocookie.com, specifically), you get the symptom that clicking the placeholder will *not* start the video, while pointing to Blocked Objects in NS Menu, then allowing it in the BO menu, *will* play the video?

Several users on multiple platforms have said they see no issue now. Can anyone else reproduce this problem, on any platform -- please?

[Ian]

I believe you. Don't have time to watch the vids right now, but it's weird. We're both on XP, same Firefox (I'm back on F3 now, but it worked on Fx 8.01); same NS dev build (before you updated.) I have entire Embeddings page checked, including "Apply to whitelisted".

IIUC, *regardless* of whether YT script is allowed (by "relatives", I meant ytimg.com and youtube-nocookie.com, specifically), you get the symptom that clicking the placeholder will *not* start the video, while pointing to Blocked Objects in NS Menu, then allowing it in the BO menu, *will* play the video?

Several users on multiple platforms have said they see no issue now. Can anyone else reproduce this problem, on any platform -- please?

Sorry, i forget about adding youtube-nocookie.com to whitelist, but now once again I re-checked with allowed youtube-nocookie.com and nothing was changed.
Yes, clicking the placeholder not start the video, allowing blocked objects in the NS menu unblock the video.
I don `t know the causes of this problem. Maybe need to reinstall browser or reinstall OS ?
I will check on VM, clean OS without any other apps.