Saturday 8 November 2014

How to switch off safety Mode for Youtube when no user is logged in.

It looks like with a recent update on Youtube, on older versions of Firefox it is hard to switch off Safety mode when no user is logged in. This is a problem when you have shared computers. After some research I figured it out that the "Safety On" preference is stored in the following cookie:

Capture 1 - cookie that stores the Safety On preference

You can get to this by clicking on Tools/Options/Privacy/Remove Individual Cookies.

While the easiest way would be just to ask users/Helpdesk Staff to remove the cookie, in real life this will not work or it will cause users extra stress. I believe on these computers  the cookie cashing for Youtube should be disabled completely. This can be done by removing the above cookie and followed by:

1. Loading a Youtube page
2. Right click anywhere on the page
3. Select: View Page Info
4. Select Permissions
5. Scroll down to Select Cookies
6. Select Block
Capture 2 - Block Cookies for Youtube

I believe this could be done also on the Enterprise version of Firefox by group policy. 

I hope it will help somebody, feel free to leave me a comment with suggestions.

Csaba