YouTube news videos grayed out in Safari

TidBITS Talk
1

For the past few days, when I open Safari (Sonoma 14.3, MacBook Pro 16-inch, 2019), visit youtube.com and click the News category, all the videos (and category buttons) are grayed out. Most, but not all, of the other categories work fine.

I have tried emptying the Safari caches and restarting the computer to no avail. The problem doesn’t occur with Firefox or Chrome.

Any ideas or suggestions?

David

2

Any Safari extensions? Try menu View > Reload Without Content Blockers.

3

Thanks for the reload suggestion, @Simon, but no change.

The only extensions I have are 1Password and Subscribe to Feed.

4

Are you using Private Relay or any kind of manual DNS settings? I can tell you that I see no such issues here. Can you replicate the behavior on an entirely different network?

5

No Private Relay or manual DNS settings.

Sorry to be ignorant but how could I use a different network?

6

Curiously, I’ve been experiencing a similar issue in Safari in the last couple of days. For me it’s been happening randomly with newspapers’ websites:

  • Control-Click on a story link on the front page to open the story in a new tab
  • when I go to that tab, the text of the article is all there but instead of the accompanying photo there’s a light grey box (at the size of the photo would usually be)
  • reload the page, same result
  • page opens fine in Firefox
  • different story from the same website will open normally
  • these are news sites I visit every day so I can confirm it’s only started in the last couple of days
  • haven’t run any software updates
7

Well, if it’s a MBP I assume you could connect to a wifi somewhere outside your home/business. Even if it’'s a stationary Mac, you could tether it to an iPhone to connect via cellular data network instead of through your home/office router setup. Just to see if it’s related to your network.

8

I was just getting ready to post an update saying it’s now working fine again when I saw your message.

If it happens again I’ll try tethering to my iPhone, and if that doesn’t make a difference, I might reinstall the system, or just wait until the 14.3.1 update.

Thanks again for your help.