Overview
- User reports that began in April 2026 describe stuttering video, frozen tabs, and single YouTube pages using more than 7GB of RAM.
- Investigations on Mozilla’s Bugzilla trace the slowdown to the row of like, share, and save buttons that keeps hiding and reappearing based on space.
- That rapid hide–show cycle forces nonstop layout recalculations, which drives CPU and memory spikes and can lock up tabs or entire systems.
- Similar complaints in Firefox and Chromium-based browsers like Edge, Brave, and Chrome shifted blame away from ad blockers or recent updates and toward YouTube’s code.
- As of early May, Mozilla developers are still probing the issue, Google and YouTube have not acknowledged a fix, and Phandroid notes a stopgap uBlock Origin filter that disables the button row.