On a blog that uses WP YouTube Lyte which I happened to stumble across, the following warning was displayed:
Hey! If you’re browsing in Firefox, there’s a very good chance that you won’t see youtube / video embeds.
As I really don’t like bugs but couldn’t reproduce any issue myself, I contacted the blog’s owner to find out what was happening. The description of the problem was pretty confusing:
The still shot/first frame of the video is there with the play icon, so things look hopeful, but when you click on the play icon the entire video disappears from the page. Page structure / layout does not change, but you are left staring at a blank white box where the embed should be.
A white div of death, really … Anyway, to cut a long story short, the misbehavior was caused by “Karma Blocker“. This Firefox addon “blocks resources based on their karma”, using a ruleset that scores behavior to blocks banners, trackers and also WP YouTube Lyte (or rather, the YouTube iFrame). Apparently the combination of the bad karma of JavaScript and the iFrame triggered the blocking mechanism.
I couldn’t code around Karma Blocker and chances are small the default configuration will give YouTube iFrames better karma, but the next version of WP YouTube Lyte (1.1.0, to be available soon) will display a simple message kindly letting users know they might want to adapt their Karma Blocker’s weightings.
But why is karma punishing me?