Firefox Stable Channel Version 127.0.2 Released, Fixes Issues with Playing YouTube Videos in 1080p and Above

Today, Firefox released the Mozilla Firefox v127.0.2 update for the stable channel, focusing on fixing issues with playing YouTube videos in 1080p resolution or higher that could cause stuttering or failure to play.

Landian.news previously reported this issue, noting that over the past few months, several users had reported to Mozilla about problems playing videos, though not all users or videos were affected. This made it very difficult for Mozilla to diagnose the problem.

However, after months of investigation, Firefox engineers finally identified that the problem was caused by YouTube, not a bug within Firefox itself. Specifically, the issue was traced back to incorrect byte stream data in YouTube's VP9 codec.

This led many to wonder why Firefox should be responsible for fixing a problem that originated from YouTube. Indeed, it is a bug on YouTube's part, but browsers like Chrome and Microsoft Edge are not affected and do not experience playback issues.

Over these months, users troubled by this issue may have started switching to browsers like Chrome, and if Firefox did not address the issue, it would only lead to further user dissatisfaction and potential loss of users.

Relying on YouTube to fix the issue could take a very long time, so it made more sense for Firefox to find a workaround rather than risk losing users while waiting for YouTube to make a fix.

Whether this bug was intentionally or unintentionally introduced by Google is unclear, especially since the issue does not occur on Chrome. YouTube engineers likely test primarily on Chrome, assuming that if there's no problem there, everything is fine.