14 DAY TRIAL // A security feature bundled with the latest version of Firefox seems to be causing issues for a number of users when trying to watch YouTube videos.
A reddit post where tens of Firefox users confirmed the problem indicates that half of videos become white when the anti-fingerprinting system in the browser is enabled.
“I’m getting an issue where the bottom half of YouTube videos are white screen… but can correct when I move mouse in/out of that area? (ie. moving mouse can make it show video fully in the screen element it's working in),” the original poster says, adding they run Firefox 75 on Windows 10.
By the looks of things, the whole issue is caused by the fingerprinting protection available in Firefox and which anyone can enable and disable with a dedicated flag in the about:config screen.
Not happening for everyone
The flag Is called privacy.resistFingerprinting, and it needs to be set to false in order to restore the normal behavior of YouTube on Firefox. Some says that blocking the following element with an ad blocker installed in Firefox also does the trick:
www.youtube.com##.ytp-gradient-bottom
Oddly enough, I can’t reproduce the issue on my device running Firefox 75 on Windows 10 with the fingerprinting protection enabled. YouTube videos seem to load correctly every time in my case.
Someone on reddit suggests that adding http or https in front of the URL on youtube.com is sometimes the thing that causes the issue, but this didn’t make any difference in my test either.
Neither Mozilla nor Google commented on this issue, but there’s a good chance it would be silently resolved in the next hours or days. Meanwhile, you can turn to the said workarounds to be able to access YouTube in the latest Firefox version even when the fingerprinting protection is enabled in the browser.