Youtube links opened in background tabs start autoplaying despite autoplay being off

Browser Support Mobile Support
,
1

Troubleshooting technical issues is much easier when both the user and support agent practice clear communication. For this reason, we have provided the template below for you to fill out with information about your issue. Please provide as much detail as possible so we can most efficiently resolve your problem.

Description of the issue:

There are already dozens of closed threads about this on ios. As they’re closed I cannot respond to them or reactive them. Note that this is NOT RELATED to playing audio in background, an ios feature that lets you play sound with the screen off. THAT IS UNRELATED TO THIS BUG-- Do not confuse it due to the use of the word “background”.

Youtube or other videos start playing automatically when opened as a new background tab. With autoplay turned off, videos should not start automatically playing. Note that this DOES work on the active tab where videos are paused on the current active tab most of the time.

How can this issue be reproduced?

  1. Go to youtube in brave browser
  2. Open a youtube video in a new background tab in brave browser by long clicking on a video and selecting from the context menu
  3. Observe the audio starts playing in the background, sometimes inconsistently but certainly more than 50 to 90% of the time.
  4. Observe the video will start playing too, with the time seeker having advanced or completing the video

Expected result:

Video does not autoplay when do not autoplay videos is toggled on.

Brave Version( check About Brave):

1.73 (97)

Mobile Device details

ipad air m2 (q4 2024) latest version, all updates. Happens on iphone 15, iphone 13 pro max as well.

Additional Information:

NOT related to playing audio in background. THIS bug report is about a bug when opening a youtube link in a new tab in a way that it’s not the immediately active tab will cause it to start autoplaying. Clicking on a video to play in the active tab will NOT autoplay, as expected.

2

Just tried replicating on my iPhone 13 Pro Max and don’t have the issue. Just to make sure we are talking the same thing, you’re holding down and choosing to open in a new tab, and then making sure not to switch to that tab but saying it’s starts playing?

IMG_7302
IMG_73021284×2778 437 KB

IMG_7303
IMG_73031284×2778 504 KB

And as you can see, by time switch the video still hasn’t started.

IMG_7304
IMG_73041284×2778 567 KB

3

@sun

I conducted extensive testing and was eventually able to replicate the behavior you described. As a result, I’ve opened a GitHub issue to address it:

cc: @steeven @Mattches

Notes

Regarding Autoplay Settings

Currently, there doesn’t appear to be an autoplay toggle on iOS. On desktop, you can disable autoplay for all websites via site settings, but I couldn’t find a similar option in the iOS app. The only autoplay toggle in Brave is related to the Playlist feature.

YouTube’s autoplay toggle, on the other hand, only prevents it from progressing to the next video automatically. I also couldn’t find any YouTube or Google settings that would disable autoplay entirely.

Background Audio

You’re correct—background audio refers to playing media while Brave is minimized, with another app in focus. This behavior is unrelated to the autoplay issue.

Behavior of Videos in Active Tabs

Interestingly, my experience differs from yours. In my tests, videos in active tabs often autoplay upon opening. This raises a key question: What specific change are you making that prevents videos from autoplaying in your case?

4

Experimental list not enabled?

5

Correct. This is also happening with Shields completely disabled, so should have nothing to do with adblocking.

I just tested again. Opened a private tab, went to YouTube, disabled Shields, typed in something (AJR), and then started going down and telling videos to Open in New Private Tab. Originally most just opened in background and never started. But on my 10th one (11th open tab) it immediately started playing.

NOTE

I think also related is in that test, I held down on tab switcher and told it to close all tabs. I’m now looking at my Dashboard with no other open tabs, but the video (music) is still playing.

Even exiting Private it continues playing. I had to completely exit Brave to make it stop.

6

Thanks. Looks like this relatively more difficult to reproduce on my 13 pro max while preparing a demo as it took a few minutes. My iPad has this consistently happen on nearly every normal attempt.

Bug video: https://youtube.com/shorts/5OoQKSr99xo
Skip to 27 seconds to see the bug happen. I try to zoom in on the video to indicate the current tab is indeed muted, check the ios audio player setting for reference, and then navigate to that tab to show it is indeed autoplaying on the recently opened tab.

The inconsistency could be related to many reasons such as some content block settings on the 13 pro max or because of how rapidly I was opening tabs rather than casual use and letting a single tab partially background load before opening more, for example.
I’ve also repeated this with no content blockers enabled in the past. This also happens on other sites with videos but youtube is the easiest way to reproduce the problem and is the most common use case.

As you can see in this video, it appears to get pretty laggy. So it could be performance related (or async bug through performance timing for example) as I notice on iPad this happens more as it’s about to crash with black boxes appearing over the screen (It looks like a general CSS bug where things just aren’t loaded properly, then usually it’ll crash after opening the next tab).

I haven’t really had brave crash on my iphone recently, though I have gotten it to crash in the past in extreme tab loading cases. Ipad brave by comparison seems unusually easy to crash under normal use after as few as 10 tabs are loaded.

Even though I have many tabs open in the iphone 13 pro max video, this can happen on ipad with only 2 or 3 tabs for videos / audio to start playing in the background.

As a side note, there seems to be issues where the youtube location I click becomes off centered usually until the page is reloaded, occurring when things start to get laggy. So clicking on a stacked list of buttons to “like” the video where the vertical options include [“like”,“dislike”,…] will cause the position of the click to go to the next row, selecting “dislike” instead.

Possibly related to that offcentered click, Clicking some of these videos starts to also highlight text detected in the thumbnail, instead of opening the context menu.

As a result of highlighting random text: Once text is selected, it becomes nearly impossible to click anything because the entire browser goes into highlight mode and there’s sometimes no way to exit without restarting the app.

In my mind, these issues as well as initial autoplay problem could all be semi related as performance bugs causing unintended side effect. However there’s no need to go off topic about these if they’re too distracting.

I’m not sure if these are IOS or Brave features but I’ll probably create a followup post if I find they’re uniquely brave related

7

Sometimes, if I close all Brave Browser (iOS) windows, clear cookies and cache, have Brave Shields Advanced Controls set to:

  • Trackers & Ads Blocking: Aggressive
  • Block Scripts: Disabled
  • Block Fingerprinting: Enabled

And using:

  • Private Browsing Only

. . . and have been playing some audio at some websites . . . such as YouTube . . .

And I close Brave Browser, and Power OFF (but not “hard” shut down) the iPhone . . .

Then, after iPhone Power ON, that audio will play automatically - without launching Brave Browser.

The script for the audio, apparently “lives” somewhere in the iPhone’s memory.

In order to stop that audio, I have to (one of the following three methods):

Use BB to revisit the webpage where I first encountered that audio - and there, I have to ENABLE the Block Scripts switch.

Click BB icon and then actually Quit (upward swipe method) BB.

Hard Restart the iPhone.

I am accustomed to dealing with the situation, but I thought that I should post confirmation that “an audio ghost” script-or-something can linger and seemingly play at will.

1 Like