EDIT: It’s something to do with my VPN and/or EasyTether, but it only happens in Firefox, so I didn’t think that could be it. I commented about my findings below: https://lemmy.world/comment/7585497
I start a video and it either doesn’t load at all of stalls within 5 seconds, never to recover.
I’ve tried everything:
- Deleting every Mozilla folder in AppData to completely refresh Firefox. (after backing up my profile)
- Flushing DNS cache
- Uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox. (Which made me remember I had a policies.json file in the program folder to permanently lockdown the settings I want. So that wasn’t the problem either.)
Even when using no extensions like an ad blockers it still won’t play videos. Besides, I’m a Premium subscriber. Once in a while a video will work, but it’s so, so rare. And often it’ll even stop after a minute.
Meanwhile, it’ll work in the DuckDuckGo Browser all the time, which is Chromium based.
What do you think the deal is? It broke rather suddenly a few weeks ago. Do you think it’s Mozilla’s fault, or Google’s?
Back in the Fall of 2023, I was trying some things to mitigate the infamous YouTube ad-blocker restrictions. Prior to that, I had been using the “Enhancer for YouTube” extension, but later disabled it via “uBlock Origin’s” recommended workaround for the ad-blocker restrictions.
I was also testing some things with “NoScript”, but found it caused some websites to not load. It’s now disabled as well.
Luckily, “uBlock Origin” seems to have solved the problem in an update I received in December, I think.
If you’ve been doing anything like what I just described, try disabling or uninstalling every extension except “uBlock Origin” and make sure you have the latest version. If that doesn’t work, try restoring default settings or disabling/uninstalling uBlock Origin and go from there.
Otherwise, I suspect you might have a bad cache, but it wouldn’t hurt to go through this list from top to bottom just to be sure you don’t miss something. The article is from 2021, so if the details don’t align with your current version of Firefox, etc, just look up how to do the same thing it recommends, only with updated instructions. https://techwiser.com/fix-youtube-not-working-firefox/
Like I said, I wiped everything and reinstalled, and it still didn’t help. It’s not an extension issue.
I think it’s a VPN issue. You can read my update, but it doesn’t make any sense why one browser would be find and another wouldn’t if it’s a VPN issue. That’s why I never thought to test that.
Ok, I wasn’t sure if you were using the Firefox Sync features or if you were restoring any of your backed up files pre/post reinstallation, which is why I brought it up again.