Why does youtube stop playing if I am in another tab

Question

Recently my surface rt has been having trouble with youtube. Every time I am watching a video and switch to fb or twitter or some other site, the video will eventually stop loading. This is a problem because i watch a lot of youtube and sometimes i just like listening while browsing other news.

Answer 1

I think it might be a battery saving feature that is not adjustable in metro / modern mode.

However, try desk top version of internet explorer. Lots of people use that for spotify etc. Might work better for background.

Or get a 3rd party YouTube app and then put it on part of the split screen (multitasking)

I think the ARM and low power features of surface rt make it run better if only one tab is chugging at the same time. I notice the same thing happens on my nexus 4. And same thing happened on my iPhone 3gs... Which I had to hack extensively to multitask.

Answer 2

I have the same problem too... loading it in desktop mode solves the problem, but this is stupid since it worked in IE10 (the issue happened to me after upgrading to 8.1)

How do we file a bug?

Answer 3

TKsurface is correct:  unused tabs in the modern IE environment are suspended so they cannot impact performance for limited power processors, but also to protect battery life.

The desktop environment has no such optimizations, so that's the way to make it play in the background.

Apps that register themselves as "media players" like music, podcast, and some video programs, can keep running in the background.