Good news for Firefox users, YouTube is now showing thumbnail previews for videos on its site, this is not the case before. Lack of WebP support could be the core reason for YouTube not to serve animated thumbnails for its videos in Firefox, FYI, Mozilla has added much-needed WebP support to Firefox with version 65, now Google’s video-sharing site seems to have made a server-side change to activate the feature in Mozilla’s browser.
Two years back YouTube announced it is bringing “video previews” to Chrome and Opera browsers on desktop to allow users to make video watching decisions. The users when hover their mouse pointer over a video thumbnail on the Homepage or search results page or watch the results page or subscriptions tab or Trending tab, a 3-sec preview will be shown.
The three 3-second video preview helps the user to take a decision whether to watch the video or skip and move to the next one. The thumbnail previews also help users to avoid clickbait videos, where the content creator shows one thumbnail for the video and serves unrelated content.
Google which is obsessed with speed, uses WebP format for images on Chrome Web Store and other sites. Five years back, Google first tried the WebP format to show animated thumbnails on YouTube. Firefox hasn’t supported the format till version 65 when it eventually added the support in late January 2019, animated thumbnails haven’t appeared out of the box in the browser on popular video hosting site.
It took more than 8 months for Google to enable the feature in Firefox which is now working in all channels (stable, beta and Nightly) or this could be a bug? And could be pulled later? What do you say?
This is terrible. I hate it. I’m looking for a way to disable it.
No kidding. I wouldn’t care about this stupid feature being present if I was just given the choice to disable it. It’s the dumbest feature. What good is it? A crappy 3 second broken animation of the video doesn’t do any more for my interest than the static thumbnail. In fact, I’m losing interest in Youtube because of all the annoyances they keep adding.
What an annoying feature, and it’s infuriating there’s no option to disable it. All it does is create more visual distractions and consume resources.
Please make it go away!
Stop hovering over the video is one option.
And the award for Least Helpful Comment goes to Venkat!
This is the opposite of good news.
This is a server-side change, as mentioned in the article very helpful to avoid clickbait videos. Those who want it go away install this add-on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-polymer-youtube/
As if Youtube wasn’t annoying enough. I can hardly stand to use the site on a computer and I refuse to use it on mobile. You can’t even install an ad blocker on mobile. My god, the site is more ads than videos. Now if you even hover over a video thumbnail it starts moving? Why not just add an animated background, buttons that swoop across the screen and a strobe light while you’re at it? How about removing all the useless animations and just design your site to not suck?