Standardize YouTube embed rewriting? #2390
Comments
annevk
added
compat
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According to our data, this is affecting somewhere between 1-3% of our users on desktop and less than that on mobile (probably half). It's not huge because it's mostly for old websites, which is also the reason why mobile is less affected. Is there any other data you would like to see? |
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From https://nerdydata.com/ ("We index approximately 160 million websites") searching in "Deep Web": Adding these together and assuming the worst case (1 match is 1 site), that is ~0.3%. |
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For comparison, we have |
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Thanks guys! As expected, this is pretty compelling data that this is important enough to justify some sort of fix. Here's some HTTP Archive data about the popularity of different embed origins/types (of the top 500k sites). So YouTube is present on ~0.27% of top sites, with histats.com behind that at about a tenth of that at 0.029%. Query: SELECT
REGEXP_EXTRACT(body, r'<embed[^>]*src=[\'"]?(http[s]?://[^/ "\']*)') AS embedsrc,
REGEXP_EXTRACT(body, r'<embed[^>]*type=[\'"]?([^ "\']*)') AS type,
COUNT(DISTINCT bodies.page) as count
FROM [httparchive:har.2017_01_15_chrome_requests_bodies]
AS bodies
JOIN (
SELECT
page, url,
JSON_EXTRACT(payload, '$._contentType') AS contentType
FROM [httparchive:har.2017_01_15_chrome_requests]
) AS requests ON requests.url=bodies.url AND requests.page=bodies.page
WHERE REGEXP_MATCH(body, r'<embed[^>]*src=[\'"]?http[s]?://')
GROUP BY embedsrc, type
ORDER BY count DESC
LIMIT 5000 |
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I would be surprised this was required for compatibility. |
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Our firefox telemetry had it at somewhere around 1% of users also when we implemented embed rewriting. It's now down to about 0.5% on our release branch. |
If there's no Flash plugin on the device or platform, this is how you get the embedded videos to keep working, right? |
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Couldn't most of the "rewriting" be done by YouTube instead of in the browser engine, though? That is, if the only hack in the browser engine is (And maybe eventually, do such |
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Yeah, we've been discussing a bit a new generic web platform feature that could enable YouTube (and everyone else in a similar position) to solve this problem themselves (basically upgrading a flash embed to an iframe). It's not clear to me what the exact requirements would be for YouTube to be able to use such a feature. If people here feel that is worth pursuing, I can see if we can find someone at Google to drive this. |
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Update: @mounirlamouri has pointed out that flash embeds are now completely deprecated by youtube. We've still got per-browser solutions to rewriting. Should we revisit this? |
Apparently chromium, Gecko and WebKit all have code for rewriting YouTube flash embeds to use HTML instead (so they work when flash is disabled, such as on mobile):
If this is now effectively required for web compat, perhaps we should work to align our implementations and specify it in HTML just to make this a little more predictable / sane? For automated testing purposes, perhaps we should include in the definition an additional hostname like
youtube.web-platform.test?@mounirlamouri can you share any data on how much of the web benefits from this? I imagine there may be other cases where we want to ask whether this is worth doing. So we may be setting a precedent here. I assume we'd only ever consider something like this when it's has truly massive positive impact on the user experience. I think it's worth having some discussion on what magnitude of usage qualifies (eg. as a fraction of page views, and/or a fraction of HTTP Archive pages).
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