Want to Restore YouTube Picture-in-Picture in iOS 15 Safari? | Check Out This Clever Extension – iDrop News
Unless you’re a Premium subscriber, getting the most out of YouTube on an iPhone or iPad has become a somewhat frustrating experience, but now an enterprising developer has come up with a solution, thanks to the advent of Safari extensions in iOS 1…….
Unless you’re a Premium subscriber, getting the most out of YouTube on an iPhone or iPad has become a somewhat frustrating experience, but now an enterprising developer has come up with a solution, thanks to the advent of Safari extensions in iOS 15.
The problem is that YouTube plays some funny tricks in Safari on iOS (and iPadOS). While watching YouTube videos in Safari on your Mac, it uses a standard HTML5 Video tag. On the other hand, for the mobile version, Google has cooked up a proprietary video player to make sure that viewers have to follow its rules, rather than the rules of the open web. It’s like the bad old days of Flash all over again.
To be fair, proprietary players aren’t an uncommon thing for premium video services — it’s how they prevent piracy — but we wouldn’t consider YouTube to fall into the same category as Netflix or Disney+ when it comes to this sort of thing.
Well, neither does developer Zhenyi Tan, and he’s come up with a solution. Tan is among those of us who remember when YouTube was based entirely on Flash — it was so bad that Apple had to roll its own YouTube app for early iPhone models. In those days, there was a Safari extension called YouTube5 that fixed this for Mac users.
The YouTube5 extension basically replaced the Flash-based YouTube player with one that uses the standard HTML5 video tag, and now Tan says we’ve reached a point where the same sort of extension is needed again — but this time to “fix” Google’s proprietary YouTube player and return us to the open standard.
And now the YouTube player situation has gotten bad enough that we need another extension to fix it. That’s where Vinegar comes in. Vinegar also replaces the YouTube player (written in who-knows-what) with a minimal HTML <video> tag.
Zhenyi Tan
Tan’s solution is Vinegar, named for the solution “commonly used as a household Tube cleaner.” It’s a $1.99 universal app available for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac that restored the standard HTML playback, bringing several benefits along with it, including the removal of in-video ads and support for background playback and picture-in-picture:
- The removal of in-video ads.
- Prevent YouTube from tracking your play/pause/seek activities.
- Restore picture-in-picture functionality.
- The videos don’t stop playing if you …….
