A Firefox bug is messing with video colors on macOS, but a fix is on the way

If you use Firefox to watch YouTube videos, you may have recently noticed something off about the colors. And well, if you did, you’re not imagining things. It turns out that a bunch of Firefox users have spotted the same issue following the recent Firefox 155 update.

Reports on Reddit say some YouTube videos look pale and washed out. The same videos, when opened in another browser, look just fine. Initial speculation was that Google might be deliberately messing with YouTube playback on Firefox. But that’s not the case. Instead, it looks like the blame lies squarely on how Firefox is handling color metadata on Macs.

Someone shared a screenshot comparing the same YouTube video playing on Firefox and Safari. You can clearly see the difference between the two. Check it out for yourself below (Firefox on the left vs Safari on the Right):

I tried to reproduce the issue on my Mac with Firefox 155. But I had a totally different experience. I fired up the same YouTube video on Chrome and Firefox to compare the colors. Instead of looking faded, the video on Firefox looked like it had boosted contrast, and even the saturation of red colors was way too high.

Here’s a screenshot I captured for comparison:

Either way, things clearly look off for Firefox users on Macs when watching videos on YouTube and other streaming sites.

Luckily, though, Mozilla has already acknowledged the issue in its release documentation. There’s an active bug report on the Mozilla Bugzilla site, and a Mozilla employee also chimed in on the Reddit thread to note that the team is aware and working on a fix.

A user on the thread suggested a workaround by disabling the ‘media.rdd-process.enabled‘ flag in the about:config page, but that’s risky. As explained by Mozilla’s engineer, flipping that preference off slightly decreases the browser’s security model by moving video decoding into the content process.

So we’d recommend avoiding that flag for now and waiting for the official fix. The fix is already live in the Firefox Nightly channel, and the developers are reviewing it for an uplift. Meaning the fix might make it to the Firefox 156 beta channel or even go live in an emergency patch over the coming days.

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