Does it install on Firefox? (And no, for the purposes of this question, Waterfox isn't Firefox)

If yes - problem with Waterfox. Don't blame me or this addon for not working. Blame Waterfox devs for screwing up the fork.

If it doesn't install in Firefox (non-dev), your Firefox profile is corrupted. Make a new one and try again.

Uploads to AMO are moderated and reviewed before being approved. When reviewers notice and point out something as trivial as two stray console.logs that I forgot to disable in prod, one would imagine they would also notice extension not installing. I'd probably also notice that.

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Edit: just tried out Waterfox. Things get a bit funnier than I first expected.

Turns out Waterfox uses the same profile as Firefox (and that you can't run both browsers at the same time). Which means that every extension that you install in Firefox is also available in Waterfox. (Extension itself seems to work with Waterfox if installed via Firefox).

All in all, you should probably file a bug report to Waterfox and attach this extension to it, because everything is correct and to spec on my end. I'm 90% certain it has something to do with Waterfox not reading manifest.json correctly.

That's not normal behaviour, obviously. Good news is, I've been able to reproduce it and good lord, that is a nifty little oversight. Fix coming soon-ish.

1. You don't have to disable/enable extension in firefox. If extension doesn't work, reloading page (F5) does the job just fine.
1.b Open the video in a new tab.

That's the workaround for the time being. I'll try to have a fix out this weekend, failing that by Christmas.


If that doesn't work, please file an issue here: https://github.com/xternal7/ultrawidify/issues
Things I want to know: exact steps to replicate, other extensions you have, operating system you use.

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Why do you have this issue (I'll try to spice it up a bit to keep it simple and interesting):

When you open youtube in a new tab, the extension tries to run. All the extension does on startup is say "hey, when the page loads, tell the page how to handle keys and add those buttons to the player bar."

Of course, we need to find where the player bar is. We also need to set the size of our buttons and menus ourselves, and the easiest way to do so is to find a button that already exists. So we say: "Hey mr. browser, would you kindly give me all the elements that call themselves a youtube player button?" And browser does what its told to do, and gives you a basket full of buttons. But you don't care about the basket full of buttons, you want to know how wide and tall a button is, and since (in general) all buttons are the same size, you say: "Hey mr browser can you please take the first item out of that basket and tell me how wide that item is?" And, keep in mind that this happens right after the page has finished loading.

Now, if you open a youtube video in a new tab, this shouldn't be a problem. There's a video on the page, so browser finds a whole basket worth of buttons, and all is well. The problem appears when you're on youtube, but the page lacks a video player (and therefore the youtube player buttons as well) — for example, the search page. In this case, when you tell the browser to fill a basket with all elements that call themselves a youtube player button, it happily does so. It gives you an empty basket and a strange look. When you ask the browser to take the first element out of that basket and tell you its width, the browser smacks you across the face and says "lol wtf? gtfo" because that's a very absurd thing to ask. At this point, the extension is crashed (until the next page load) and won't do a thing (until the next reload).

.

TL;DR:
Extension: "Give me a basket with buttons"
Browser: "Okay, here's the basket. But it's empty — there isn't any buttons."
Extension: "Tell me the width of the first button."
Browser: "Go to the naughty corner and think about what you've done."

Short answer: no. (Unless you want to always cut off top and bottom, even when top and bottom aren't useless black bars, then yeah. I can do that. You probably don't want that, though, in which case it's 'no'.)


Long, technical answer: if you want to auto-fit video, as in "16:9 videos stay the way they are, but 21:9 videos should fit the screen" ... this actually looks potentially possible in theory and I might do it (but absolutely no guarantees that I'll actually do it), but there's a few problems I can see right off the bat:

0. I'd obviously need to have a way to read a column of pixels from the video. Our lord and saviour HTML5/Canvas apparently can do it, but is it even possible to get youtube video to a HTML5 canvas? So far, quick snooping suggest this is possible, but I haven't had any time to actually look at how this is done.

1. Detecting aspect ratio seems simple enough on the surface. Take couple of columns, compare if all columns have an equal amount of black pixels on the top or on the bottom. If yes - congrats, you detected black bars, proceed to correct the aspect ratio.

But there's a problem - a couple of them, in fact. If video starts completely black, you have no way of telling whether the video has the black bars or not. If you watch a movie trailer, should you trust the "This video is rated that" screen for aspect ratio? What about if the bars aren't pitch black, but greyish instead? What if video features two completely solid, horizontal objects at the beginning - imagine a camera looking through a horizontal square hole in the wall? How long and how often you try to detect the aspect ratio when the video is playing? What if video changes aspect ratios midway through, like in the first Hunger Games movie? Or in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4InaygqShwA (starts in 16:9, then goes to 21:9)
Or like in the Dark Souls III trailer, where trailer was 21:9 but got to 16:9 for about 10 seconds at the end of the video (obviously NSFW):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zDZYrIUgKE

2. Effect on performance. Autodetection could potentially require quite a bit of processing power. This in turn could make the video (or even the browser) to lag.

Now, I've actually been thinking about implementing this feature before, but the problems outlined above are the reason I haven't actually pinky-promised that feature in the "plans for the future" section. I can't guarantee it'll do it, I can't guarantee it'll work at all and I can't guarantee it'll work well.

Besides, my current priorities are:
* making a 'settings' page + configurable shortcuts (hopefully by the end of the month, but currently things aren't going exactly the way I've planned)
* Netflix support (probably by the end of the year, because December looks like a nice month to take advantage of their "you can try it for free for one month" offer)




E: sorry for this wall of text, but Moz seemingly doesn't allow any formatting in the text.