YouTube – Player requests localhost:8881/crossdomain.xml

This is a really annoying bug within the (new) YouTube flash player.

As far as I’ve understood the change that leads to the player trying to load the crossdomain.xml file on my local box and while – due to obvious reasons – failing to do so it slows my browsers down to a point where they – Safari and FireFox on Mac OS X that is – literally freeze – is meant to be a security fix. I love secure things – secure things in the web even more but this went horribly wrong. Please see the below screenshot from the Safari Activity window with the failing requests.

Now you would think that a quick web search would guide you the way to the solution of this nasty handbrake like stupidity – but you guessed wrong.  A quick journey to the YouTube help section then – right?  Again wrong no mentioning here either. A search in their help forum reveals that others have the same issue and even worse ones based on this bug but no solution is provided. Apart from “clear you cache” or “downgrade your flash player”.

Short answer, it looks likes one or more of the following have a problem with IPV6: FireFox 3, IE6, XP SP3, Flash and the solution (workaround really) is to uninstall IPV6.

Let me explain. Over the course of troubleshooting I noticed that when the browser froze up, sometimes in the status bar it said it was connecting to localhost. I tried looking for why and couldn’t figure out why it was doing that and just threw away that as the reason for this. Tonight however on another thread about this issue I saw someone else also note that he saw connections to http://localhost:8881/crossdomain.xml.

So, after a little investigation I found that firefox seemed to have issues all the time when I tried to http://localhost on any port (50% cpu like before, but when I hit stop it worked again). I then went to a dos prompt and did a “ping localhost” and I saw that instead of resolving to 127.0.0.1, localhost resolved to the ipv6 ip address (::1 or something like that).

So, as a test I decided I’d uninstall ipv6, and after a reboot I have not yet had any problems! All videos both embedded and on the site work fine!

Come on guys you can do better than this. Google and Adobe you should be able to figure something out that’s secure and works – just try – it is Christmastime!