Show HN: Workaround for YouTube's "Save to Watch Later" Broken in Firefox(gist.github.com)

2 pointsby aabbcc12417 mesi fa3 comments

gist.github.com

Show HN: Workaround for YouTube's "Save to Watch Later" Broken in Firefox

https://gist.github.com/beenotung/6cfb46bd5f4f800ac5393317536714fe

YouTube's "Save to Watch Later" popover menu has been broken in Firefox for years (at least on my Linux installations). The three-dot menu → "Save to Watch Later" doesn't respond to clicks. Other popover menus work fine (account menu, upload menu), but this specific one is broken.

I reported it on Twitter/X (YouTube staff responded asking for feedback), submitted feedback through YouTube's website, but it's still broken as of December 27, 2025.

My workaround: Copy video URL → Open Chrome → Save → Switch back to Firefox. Very inconvenient when Firefox is your main browser.

I finally built a userscript workaround that fixes this for me:

  - Adds a direct "Watch Later" button to the video menu via DOM injection (bypasses broken popover)
  - Saves videos to localStorage and automatically saves them when they appear in recommendation sidebars on other pages
  - Injects pending videos directly into the Watch Later playlist page DOM (shows them at the top with clear "not saved yet" indicators)

Why this approach? YouTube has complex authentication checking, so you can't simply send a POST request to add videos to playlists. Instead, the script waits for videos to naturally appear in recommendation sidebars, then clicks YouTube's own "Watch Later" buttons (which DO work in Firefox when hovered).

Works in Firefox with Tampermonkey or other userscript addons.

Code: https://gist.github.com/beenotung/6cfb46bd5f4f800ac539331753...

Sharing in case other Firefox users are experiencing the same issue. I hope YouTube will eventually fix this and make sure it works not just in Chrome, but until then, this script works for me.

3 comments

subeadia7 mesi fa

It's always worked in Firefox for me? I also like this Firefox extension (https://github.com/WorldThirteen/youtube-watch-later-shortcu...) which allows mapping a keyboard shortcut for quickly adding YT videos to the "Watch Later" playlist.

aabbcc12416 mesi fa

Thanks for sharing your state. I just tried again with troubleshoot mode, it works ...

Then it seems to be in conflict with some addon I'm using.

aabbcc12416 mesi fa

I found that it is caused by a userscript running below code.

    // version 1
    let body = document.createElement('body')
    body.innerHTML = document.body.innerHTML

    // version 2
    let body = document.body.cloneNode(true)

Either version can trigger the bug of the pop up menu now showing up. The menu is able to show up if doing early return to skip that code.

This is wired, that code should not be mutating existing DOM.

Update: Below version of sandboxed clone doesn't break the youtube popup menu.

    // version 3
    let parser = new DOMParser()
    let doc = parser.parseFromString(document.body.outerHTML, 'text/html')
    let body = doc.body