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?