In my recent experience: definitely yes, though not significantly worse. Unless you have [many] hundreds of tabs open (which I do as I have neither executive function nor organisational skills), or have a machine with very limited RAM, I don't think you'll notice a difference.
This is anecdata, of course, take with a pinch of your preferred flavouring powder.
Chrome on Windows is running with thousands of tabs "open" over dozens of windows, but it does practically max out on a certain number of tabs per window (not just the GUI, but something in the memory architecture), and it does stack fat cache which will crash the whole thing if it digs deeper than your available space.
Windows even runs (semi-playably) 2020's shooters in this condition, though you need to kill any windows close to the tab limit that are full of recently opened tabs.
> Chrome also came in at slightly lower memory consumption across all the benchmarks with total memory usage on average at 4.67GB to Firefox at 4.83GB.
Thats good to know, but I am a "out of the box" person. I never want to have to manually install extensions as thats just more stuff to remember when setting up a new machine. Yea thats a me problem, but still.
It used to support it out-of-the-box as well, but it's technically against YouTube's ToS to allow this without paying for a premium, so now you need this as an extra hoop.
Agreed, this sounds strange indeed. Much more likely is that Google found a reliable way to detect the screen status using a standard feature and Mozilla just implements the standard neutrally
Wouldn't know, as I have never been in charge of one, but I imagine Google having the power to make your browser completely irrelevant would be a pretty strong incentive.
Nah I want general media playback in the background. Doesn't matter if its Youtube or any other platform. I dont want giga corpos to monetize my attention. Youtube does well enough from ads anyway ;)
Even youtube's app itself doesn't allow that unless you pay. I suspect they've nobbled most browsers into not allowing it, either by technical measures or (more likely) the strong-arm tactic of saying “if you don't block this we'll find a way to make the entire of youtube practically unusable on your browser”.
I've been using Grayjay recently which does allow that, amongst a number of other useful features (integrating other media sources, lack of adverts every few minutes in some content). Might be worth considering as an option.
I suspect that if youtube's metric show that enough people are doing that (without paid accounts) it'll stop by default for the same reasons it stopped in FF.
I used ublock origin for a while, but I kept having issues with it on Youtube due to Youtubes anti adblock measurements. Brave for some reason always had a fix for it pretty quickly, so I never experienced these issues with it. Maybe I could try a different browser again on my next machine.
In iOS kinda yes; you have to request desktop version, and once you activate the lock screen for the first time you have to press “play”. Then it just plays and auto plays in the background.
Don’t know about android, but there is also an extension there that blocks the visibility page api for YouTube.
