I noticed this earlier, and I'm not the only one, I've asked around and people have tried using it in the search bar on Firefox and it just doesn't work.
Space bar is hilarious for me on YouTube/Firefox. Some times it gets into a certain focus state (play button focussed?) and hitting space bar will briefly pause it, then resume playback. Hilarity ensues as I scramble, pausing a few times to realize the issue, and change the focus to something else by clicking the video canvas then press spacebar again for success.
This hits something that I've come across before. Web pages are actually 3D with focus, always. But it's not clear, because the representation is 2D and the focus is either limited to certain elements (like <input/>) or has to be manually implemented by the developer. And sometimes, like with YouTube, even long lived websites with supposedly lots of experience get it wrong.
And this is hard to think about as a developer, imagine how it is for someone non-internet native, who barely understand the mouse-abstraction we all gotten so used to.
I do think touchscreens have made technology possible for a lot of groups who didn't understand it before. Maybe we need something similar for desktop and laptop to avoid 3D in 2D jam we're in now.
It's disconcerting when you press the spacebar and the video doesn't pause, but the video settings open... until you remember you went to settings to look for subtitles, but there were none, and you closed it without changing the focus to the page or video.
It happens with other video sites, so it's not evil Google handicapping Firefox users.
I imagine it has something to do with the keyboard shortcuts for video player controls, which I'm going to list because I think they're neat and was very excited when I discovered them.
space - play/pause
j - skip back
k - play/pause
l - skip forward
0-9 - skip to the n/10th point of the video
m - mute
f - fullscreen
t - "theater mode" which is the bigger-but-not-full-screen video size
I'm sure there are others, but those are the ones I use often enough to remember. I like to use K to play/pause because I never end up accidentally scrolling down into the comments section.
There is indeed more. And there is one hotkey to rule them all, pressing "?" which shows all hotkeys.
"?" is one hotkey I keep pressing in a lot of random contexts, just to see what it does. In many applications it shows all the hotkeys, or if you add some modifier like shift or alt.
Pressing "?" in Gmail shows a large help window with tons of shortcuts (you need to have keyboard shortcuts enabled under Settings > General for this to work).
F1 is now occupied by the native applications help page. Web applications/pages then need to adopt a different one. "?" kind of also make the UX a bit more obvious, honestly. F1 is based around tradition, "?" is based on the idea that you have no idea.
I noticed this this AM and assumed it was something around Firefox or otherwise specific to me. The situation for me was not being able to create a new playlist when saving a video because it would trigger all of the keyboard shortcuts while typing. It would mostly work...until you get to a letter like "f" and fullscreen blows away the modal.
This is a bit of a cautionary tale around the dangers of hijacking "normal" behavior: when a bug happens, you break really, really basic things.
Same. I can't remember why exactly I switched, but I recall space bar being more of a gamble whether I would pause/unpause or scroll down the screen. K seemed to work better.
For me, if the play/pause button has focus, then the video starts playing for half a second and then pauses, because the button activation and the hotkey cancel each other. "k" does not have this issue.
Also space to toggle pausing during playback has worked only intermittently for some time. Always solid in Chrome. I think it depends what's focused, but never figured out the details.
Reading the headline I was afraid YouTube started disabling the Spacebar for play/pause because of some vague UX reason. But it's the other way around.
