There’s something special about Apple’s Safari and Google’s YouTube that we don’t quite understand. Together they create a storm, an unfavorable experience for users. Back in 2011 we reported issues with YouTube and Safari — users on Mac running Safari browser were unable to watch videos on YouTube due to the black screen issue. Videos never loaded, even after several reloads. Here’s another problem faced by the same set of users.
According to the Apple forum, users running Safari 6.0 (or the newest version) are not able to run YouTube videos. The frustration further intensifies when Safari browser crashes. In that case, you have to relaunch the browser and retype the YouTube URL again, but we don’t think that is going to help you anyway.
There are fairly large number of common solutions to this problem, and that’s where it really gets annoying. For instance, you can go ahead and disable Adobe flash player, then reinstall it again. Now launch Safari browser and see if YouTube works. Or, you can update the Safari’s flash player plugin.
You can also disable hardware acceleration to run videos on YouTube.
However, if you have already tried the above solutions with no luck, then we have two more solution — from the Apple forum — that should bring YouTube back to life.
Solution 1: Disable YouTube HTML5 Trial
If you are part of the YouTube HTML5 trial, then leave the trial immediately (click here). Relaunch Safari and videos will now run on Adobe Flash player. This seem to have fixed the video problem for an Apple member:
OK, I’ll stop blaming flash and either blame Apple or YouTube…
I went to http://www.youtube.com/html5 and found that I was part of the HTML5 trial for YouTube and that YouTube videos should be playing via HTML5 and not Flash.
I left the HTML5 trial so that the video were being played by nasty old Flash… Guess what, it works.
Videos are now playing normally using Flash.
My suggestion is go to http://www.youtube.com/html5 and see if you are part of the HTML5 trial also, if you are, leave the trial and see how you go.
Solution 2: Use YouTube5 Extension on Safari
YouTube5 is a Safari extension that replaces YouTube’s official player with its custom player. It’s free and immediately fixes the problem:
The developer of http://www.verticalforest.com/youtube5-extension/ should be awarded a medal for making my 4 years old MacBook Air play videos perfectly again AND not making it crash after 10 minutes of watching Flash videos on Mac OS X Lion. Not all sites, but I certainly use YouTube a lot and even 1080p videos stream smoothly.
Another member says:
I agree… the YouTube5 extension is great! In response to others, I was never in the HTML5 trial and was having problems with YouTube, so that wasn’t the problem for me (although it sounds like it was a problems for others). Things seem to be working now since the latest flash updates, so I’m guessing that was the problem.
Via Apple forum
On iMac and MacBook Pro running Mac OS X Mountain Lion, we were able to run YouTube videos just fine — not sure if this has to do anything with the new YouTube player. However, if any of the above solution worked for you, please let us know through the comment section below!
