Are Your Youtube Video Thumbnails Missing in Firefox?

Just last night, I was frustrated at the fact that some of the video thumbnails in the popular video sharing site of Youtube were missing in my Firefox! Not only that but I’ve noticed that other similar sites were showing the same symptoms. Some of the thumbnails would load but then at other times it wouldn’t. It’s as if my network connection all of a sudden disconnected. If this is happening to you as well, there is a simple Firefox configuration setting you can configure to hopefully bring everything back to normal.

To show you exactly what I mean, here is a screenshot of my Youtube homepage. You can clearly see that the thumbnails are missing. When I play a video clip, the thumbnails are also missing in the Related Video section.

In Firefox, there is a way for users to configure advanced user and configuration preferences. By typing in about:config into the address bar, you are allowed to edit these options which you normally wouldn’t have to worry about.

1. Type in about:config into your Firefox address bar. You’ll then be greeted with a friendly, and rather funny, security warning. Although the warning would seem like a joke at first, it’s actually not. There are many preferences that you are allowed to customize and making changes to the setting without first realizing what they actually do is not good. However, fixing it should be as simple as heading back to the configuration page and setting the option back to its default.

2. In the Filter box, simply type in the word ‘image’. This will obviously show us only the options that have the word in it. Firefox will show you the results as soon as you type it in.

3. The option you want to configure is dom.disable_image_src_set. If you are in my situation, than the value under its Value entry should be set to true. Simply double click on this entry to set the value to false.

4. Next, simply close out of the configuration page (don’t be tempted to mess with the other settings!). Now you’ll want to reload your Youtube or whatever video site that wasn’t rendering its thumbnails properly to see if the fix works. As you can see, it certainly did the trick for me!

 

Other Things to Try Out…

UPDATE: 11/08/10

If you’ve applied the above method and thumbnails are still missing, here are some other alternative things you can do to try and remedy the problem.

- A reader recently informed me that he fixed the missing Youtube thumbnail problem due to him not having cookies enabled in his Firefox browser. I found this quite surprising because I assume that most users out there have cookies enabled by default. Once the option has been enabled, his Youtube thumbnails all came back from the dead.

Head over to Tools -> Options -> Privacy. Make sure that the cookies options is enabled. If thumbnails still don’t appear, head back to this page and hit the Exceptions button and create a simple filter to allow the URL addresses of youtube.com and www.youtube.com to have your computer always accept cookies from these sites.

- Due to ability to customize Firefox with so many different add-on’s, there is a slight possibility that one you have installed is causing the images and thumbnails to not load correctly in the browser. A simple method to see whether this is true or not is to load Youtube under Firefox Safe Mode. In Safe Mode, Firefox disables all add-on’s you have installed. If the thumbnails appear on the Youtube homepage while in Safe Mode, it’s a good sign that a add-on is the culprit behind the problem. You could then reload Firefox and slowly disable each add-on until you have found the culprit.

Follow these steps to browser under Safe Mode:

1. Close out of all instances of Firefox.
2. In your Start menu, navigate to the Mozilla Firefox folder and there should be two options inside: Firefox and Firefox (Safe Mode). In our case, select the latter.
3. A window will appear asking you if you want to make any changes permanently. Do not select anything. Hit the Continue to Safe Mode button and then browse to Youtube.

- Last but not least, you can go over this article from Mozillazine which goes over a ton of other fixes that might help out with the image loading problem you’ve got within Firefox.

If anyone applied theses tweak but haven’t gotten better results, please let me know. Also, if you have used another method not listed here to fix the thumbnail problem, I would also appreciate it if you share what you have found. I can then list it in this article to help benefit others in the future who have this same problem.