is it as greedy as chrome for the ram?

In my recent experience: definitely yes, though not significantly worse. Unless you have [many] hundreds of tabs open (which I do as I have neither executive function nor organisational skills), or have a machine with very limited RAM, I don't think you'll notice a difference.

This is anecdata, of course, take with a pinch of your preferred flavouring powder.

Chrome on Windows is running with thousands of tabs "open" over dozens of windows, but it does practically max out on a certain number of tabs per window (not just the GUI, but something in the memory architecture), and it does stack fat cache which will crash the whole thing if it digs deeper than your available space.

Windows even runs (semi-playably) 2020's shooters in this condition, though you need to kill any windows close to the tab limit that are full of recently opened tabs.

[Yes, I know, the horror]

Yes: https://www.phoronix.com/review/firefox-chrome-2026/4

> Chrome also came in at slightly lower memory consumption across all the benchmarks with total memory usage on average at 4.67GB to Firefox at 4.83GB.

Does it allow me to play youtube on locked screen on mobile?

You can play yt video in firefox with locked screen but you need to use desktop mode

Yes, actually!

Well, it does require you to install an extension[0], but it can be done.

[0]: <https://github.com/mozilla/video-bg-play>

Thats good to know, but I am a "out of the box" person. I never want to have to manually install extensions as thats just more stuff to remember when setting up a new machine. Yea thats a me problem, but still.

You don't install software on your machines that didn't come pre-installed/configured?

They're literally asking for a paid YouTube feature to be free "out of the box". Lol wild.

Nah I want general media playback in the background. Doesn't matter if its Youtube or any other platform. I dont want giga corpos to monetize my attention. Youtube does well enough from ads anyway ;)

It used to support it out-of-the-box as well, but it's technically against YouTube's ToS to allow this without paying for a premium, so now you need this as an extra hoop.

Why should a browser be policing YouTube’s ToS for them?

Agreed, this sounds strange indeed. Much more likely is that Google found a reliable way to detect the screen status using a standard feature and Mozilla just implements the standard neutrally

Wouldn't know, as I have never been in charge of one, but I imagine Google having the power to make your browser completely irrelevant would be a pretty strong incentive.

You want to have your cake and eat it too, I think the best solution in your case is paying for youtube

Or I just keep using brave and not pay for the biggest media corpo that just passed Disney in revenue.

Was Brave pre-installed on your computer or did you remember to install it?

Even youtube's app itself doesn't allow that unless you pay. I suspect they've nobbled most browsers into not allowing it, either by technical measures or (more likely) the strong-arm tactic of saying “if you don't block this we'll find a way to make the entire of youtube practically unusable on your browser”.

I've been using Grayjay recently which does allow that, amongst a number of other useful features (integrating other media sources, lack of adverts every few minutes in some content). Might be worth considering as an option.

Kagi’s Orion browser on iOS is able to play YT vids in the background.

I suspect that if youtube's metric show that enough people are doing that (without paid accounts) it'll stop by default for the same reasons it stopped in FF.

Why not simply use NewPipe [0]?

You also get ad filtering and you can download Audio/Video streams from within the app.

[0] https://newpipe.net/

It allows you to play youtube without ads with ublock origin.

I used ublock origin for a while, but I kept having issues with it on Youtube due to Youtubes anti adblock measurements. Brave for some reason always had a fix for it pretty quickly, so I never experienced these issues with it. Maybe I could try a different browser again on my next machine.

In iOS kinda yes; you have to request desktop version, and once you activate the lock screen for the first time you have to press “play”. Then it just plays and auto plays in the background.

Don’t know about android, but there is also an extension there that blocks the visibility page api for YouTube.

Yes. That's the primary reason I use it, but you have to install an extension called "Video Background Play Fix".

Tubular app does, and it blocks ads