an observation about YouTube
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Today I opened YouTube in Internet Explorer on a Microsoft Windows Vista computer. The "full screen" button in YouTube's JavaScript (?) video player was greyed out, and I couldn't watch videos in full screen mode. At the top of the website, a narrow banner recommended Google Chrome.
Is there a reason that Google/YouTube won't do full-screen video in Internet Explorer? I wondered whether Youtube/Google was diminishing compatibility with their competitors' web browsers to give their own web browser an advantage in the market. Maybe the full-screen button was greyed out because I did something wrong, maybe something to do with Vista not being supported any more (is it?), or maybe there's some other reason for YouTube's lesser functionality on Internet Explorer.
Any thoughts? Has this happend with others' Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, etc? Are there laws (which countries/etc?) that restrict or prohibit preferential treatment like this might be?
Although not exactly the same, it reminds me of Microsoft's HTML situation:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/17/opera_ceo_microsoft/
I am a member!
Pretty much, they want to have as much dominance over our browsing as possible.
You would be interested in this critique of Youtube by Richard Stallman: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/whats-wrong-with-youtube.html
If you're right, is YouTube's decision contrary to net neutrality? They're not throttling by speed; they're throttling features. This is assuming that there isn't some other explanation, of course.
Net Neutrality:
"the idea, principle, or requirement that Internet service providers should or must treat all Internet data as the same regardless of its kind, source, or destination"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/net%20neutrality
Edit: YouTube isn't an ISP ... so maybe net neutrality is not the issue. Something analogous? Or would that unfairly restrict a popular website owner's freedom?
By the way thanks for the link
It has nothing to do with net neutrality. Net neutrality is about companies which provide the service of routing traffic. YouTube does much more than that, including storing the videos and indexing them for search. It's their servers, so they have a right to take down videos from them. The same goes for MediaGoblin instance owners.
name at domain wrote:
> Is there a reason that Google/YouTube won't do full-screen video in
> Internet Explorer?
We're not Google or YouTube's tech support.
> I wondered whether Youtube/Google was diminishing compatibility with
> their competitors' web browsers to give their own web browser an
> advantage in the market.
Perhaps so; you should try asking them since it's their webpage. As far as
any free software distro mailing list ought to be concerned, this might be
a fight between software proprietors and you'd be better off finding the
videos you seek elsewhere, or using a free program such as youtube-dl to
download the videos (which I understand doesn't execute the non-free JS
code YouTube serves), or skipping them in favor of videos that favor free
software. archive.org hosts many such videos and doesn't require non-free
software to work with at all.
I certainly recommend avoiding non-free software such as Windows, Google
Chrome, and the non-free code in YouTube altogether.
I think that it's worth having this kind of discussion.
I didn't ask for help to use YouTube, IE, etc. I just wanted to talk about whether Youtube/Google might give its web browser preferential treatment via YouTube. And what the boundaries are, if there are any here.
+1 archive.org. ;)
Also, found out that YouTube seems to make the webpage refresh and
revert the copy-paste stack of your operating system if you happen to
copy some text from inside the videos' webpages. So I do agree: Avoid
YouTube all-together, and also avoid sharing YouTube links. ;)
"J.B. Nicholson" <name at domain> writes:
> name at domain wrote:
>> Is there a reason that Google/YouTube won't do full-screen video in
>> Internet Explorer?
>
> We're not Google or YouTube's tech support.
>
>> I wondered whether Youtube/Google was diminishing compatibility with
>> their competitors' web browsers to give their own web browser an
>> advantage in the market.
> Perhaps so; you should try asking them since it's their webpage. As
> far as any free software distro mailing list ought to be concerned,
> this might be a fight between software proprietors and you'd be better
> off finding the videos you seek elsewhere, or using a free program
> such as youtube-dl to download the videos (which I understand doesn't
> execute the non-free JS code YouTube serves), or skipping them in
> favor of videos that favor free software. archive.org hosts many such
> videos and doesn't require non-free software to work with at all.
>
> I certainly recommend avoiding non-free software such as Windows,
> Google Chrome, and the non-free code in YouTube altogether.
>
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It could just be that IE doesn't support fullscreen. It wouldn't surprise me considering how old it is. I do remember in the early experimental days that YouTube's HTML5 player didn't support fullscreen at all and I got the impression that was a technical limitation.
IE would have to support full screen for the JavaScript video player to take advantage of it? I know almost nothing about coding so I'll defer to your guess. It also seems most likely because it would be pretty bold of YouTube/Google to cut out Microsoft, right?
The latest version of IE that can run on Windows Vista is version 9. That version was released in 2011, when HTML5 was in its infancy. Vista itself was released when YouTube itself (using the old Flash video player) was new. So yeah, the fact that it even works with YouTube's HTML+JavaScript player at all is kind of miraculous.
Thanks Onpon
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