Firefox mobile is a really good web browser for the smartphone, even if one have to give up a lot of space in the device’s limited storage to use it. Every Firefox user has a favorite feature, mine is YouTube background play. Sadly, without any upgrade, it just stop working. I haven’t had the time to debug it, but I suspect Firefox signals in some way the losing of device’s focus and YouTube were not capturing this signal until recently.

A quick Google search revealed this ia indeed a recent development. Much to my dismay, there seems to have no solution. Luckily I still had my BGTube apk lying around (rather old and buggy, but a small and clever app)…

But today I tried a different thing: Private Browsing. Bingo! It just worked. So it really is some tracking evil YouTube is doing to prevent background playback… I’d try to understand what it’s doing, unfortunately I’ll not have time for this… But I’ll track the issue and if someone finds out I’ll edit this post.

Happy hacking!