Google Operating System Unofficial news and tips about Google

  • Subscribe to our RSS feed.
  • Twitter
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • Facebook
  • Digg

Sunday, 9 January 2011

YouTube's HTML5 Rickrolling

Posted on 11:16 by Unknown
YouTube's HTML5 interface has a very cool feature: if you right-click on a video, you'll no longer see the boring contextual menu displayed by the browser that added uninteresting features like downloading videos. Instead, you'll get a much more useful menu that sends you to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" video.

Some would say that this trick reminds them of the sites that annoyed users by disabling browser features like the contextual menu so that people can't save an image or copy some text. But that's not what happens here: YouTube's terms of use forbid users from downloading videos and the new menu solves this issue by offering a better option. After all, why download a video when you can listen to Rick Astley's fabulous song?


There are at least two uncivil browsers (Firefox and Opera) that treat videos just like images and allow users to right-click on a video and download it. Firefox even lets you disable custom contextual menus for all sites, while Opera provides more granular options. There's even a developer that breached YouTube's terms of use by creating a Greasemonkey script with a strange name: Youtube HTML5 Beta "Save Video As" Unrickroller. Apparently, he lost his sense of humor or he's not a Rick Astley fan.

I'm not going to use any of these features and I'll switch to Internet Explorer, a browser that doesn't offer a download option for videos (mostly because it doesn't support HTML5 videos). Whenever I want to download a YouTube video, I'll ignore all those scripts and tricks and I'll read YouTube's terms of use, while listening to Rick Astley's song. They're a perfect match.

"... You know the rules and so do I ..."
Email ThisBlogThis!Share to XShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest
Posted in YouTube | No comments
Newer Post Older Post Home

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Popular Posts

  • More People Can Buy Apps from the Android Market
    If there's one thing that Google should do to improve Android, it's developing a better Android Market. Google's app store has a...
  • Could Google Save Yahoo from Microsoft?
    Microsoft is taking over Yahoo! by Gnal. Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution . Even if it's hard to believe that Yahoo will accept...
  • Google's Marketing Dashboard
    MediaPost reports that Google wants to integrate the reporting features from all of its ad products to provide a "fully functional mar...
  • Watch a Video in YouTube's HTML5 Player
    In January, YouTube launched a player that used the HTML5 video tag. To try this player, you have to go to youtube.com/html5 and enable th...
  • Swipe Navigation in the Mobile Gmail Site
    One month ago, Google updated the Gmail app for iOS and added a swipe gesture that lets you move between conversations without having to re...
  • A Bogus DMCA Takedown Request (Part 3)
    I've mentioned in the previous two posts that Inspection 12 sent a DMCA notice for one of my posts, Google took it offline and reject...
  • The Old Image Search, Still Available
    The old Google Image Search interface is still available in the OneBox result that's displayed for some Google searches like [tropical b...
  • Google+ Photo Search With Image Recognition
    Last year, Google Drive added an advanced image search feature powered by Goggles that recognizes objects and uses OCR technology to extrac...
  • Search Engine Comparison Poll: The Results
    Six days ago, I posted a poll that asked you to evaluate the quality of the first results from Google, Yahoo, Windows Live. You had to ente...
  • Bring the Mashups to Google Maps
    Google Maps API was the most successful API ever created by Google and the tool behind a lot of cool mashups available on the web today. Th...

Categories

  • Acquisitions (17)
  • Ads (16)
  • AJAX Search (4)
  • Android (83)
  • Annoyances (7)
  • API (9)
  • April Fools Day (2)
  • Blog Search (4)
  • Blogger (20)
  • Book Search (11)
  • DMCA (4)
  • Easter Egg (18)
  • FeedBurner (4)
  • Firefox extensions (10)
  • Froogle (1)
  • Game (3)
  • gm (1)
  • Gmail (161)
  • Google Analytics (4)
  • Google Apps (17)
  • Google Bookmarks (7)
  • Google Buzz (14)
  • Google Calendar (17)
  • Google Cast (3)
  • Google Checkout (5)
  • Google Chrome (105)
  • Google Chrome OS (28)
  • Google Co-op (9)
  • Google Contacts (9)
  • Google Desktop (5)
  • Google Dictionary (8)
  • Google Docs (80)
  • Google Drive (41)
  • Google Earth (22)
  • Google Gears (5)
  • Google Goggles (7)
  • Google Groups (2)
  • Google Hangouts (4)
  • Google Health (2)
  • Google Instant (15)
  • Google Keep (5)
  • Google Latitude (5)
  • Google Local (9)
  • Google Maps (80)
  • Google Music (3)
  • Google News (20)
  • Google Notebook (9)
  • Google Now (14)
  • Google Pack (2)
  • Google Phone (9)
  • Google Photos (14)
  • Google Play (3)
  • Google Plus (29)
  • Google Profiles (5)
  • Google Promos (2)
  • Google Reader (47)
  • Google Scholar (1)
  • Google Sites (1)
  • Google Suggest (13)
  • Google Takeout (1)
  • Google Talk (19)
  • Google Toolbar (7)
  • Google Translate (38)
  • Google Trends (9)
  • Google TV (4)
  • Google Update (1)
  • Google Video (11)
  • Google Voice (6)
  • Google Wallet (2)
  • Google Wave (3)
  • Greasemonkey (10)
  • iGoogle (32)
  • Image Search (31)
  • InOut (13)
  • Knowledge (14)
  • Mobile (133)
  • Month in review (1)
  • Music (3)
  • Nostalgia (6)
  • OneBox (19)
  • orkut (10)
  • Page Creator (1)
  • Picasa (5)
  • Picasa Web Albums (22)
  • SearchMash (2)
  • Security (10)
  • Social (32)
  • Software (4)
  • Spam (2)
  • Tips (86)
  • Universal Search (3)
  • User interface (116)
  • Visualization (9)
  • Voice Search (14)
  • Web History (7)
  • Web Search (202)
  • Webmasters (5)
  • Windows Live (5)
  • Yahoo (8)
  • Yahoo Pipes (2)
  • YouTube (122)

Blog Archive

  • ►  2013 (364)
    • ►  September (1)
    • ►  August (60)
    • ►  July (60)
    • ►  June (56)
    • ►  May (59)
    • ►  April (48)
    • ►  March (47)
    • ►  February (29)
    • ►  January (4)
  • ►  2012 (134)
    • ►  December (14)
    • ►  November (18)
    • ►  October (26)
    • ►  September (5)
    • ►  August (8)
    • ►  July (17)
    • ►  June (24)
    • ►  May (4)
    • ►  April (18)
  • ▼  2011 (13)
    • ▼  January (13)
      • Google Can't Find Paris
      • Google Goggles Solves Sudoku Puzzles
      • Android Addresses UI Shortcomings
      • Drag and Drop Uploading for YouTube Videos
      • YouTube's HTML5 Rickrolling
      • Google Docs Plays Videos
      • Picasa Web Adds HTTPS Support
      • Honeycomb: Android for Tablets
      • Google Docs Viewer for Spreadsheets
      • Google Bookmarks Import Without Using Google Toolbar
      • Top 10 Google Labs Projects From 2010
      • Voice Search for Google Chrome
      • Picasa Web Albums Wish List
  • ►  2010 (487)
    • ►  December (47)
    • ►  November (37)
    • ►  October (44)
    • ►  September (44)
    • ►  August (55)
    • ►  July (44)
    • ►  June (43)
    • ►  May (54)
    • ►  April (48)
    • ►  March (40)
    • ►  February (28)
    • ►  January (3)
  • ►  2008 (65)
    • ►  February (13)
    • ►  January (52)
  • ►  2007 (435)
    • ►  December (60)
    • ►  November (55)
    • ►  October (57)
    • ►  September (64)
    • ►  August (59)
    • ►  July (70)
    • ►  June (59)
    • ►  May (11)
Powered by Blogger.

About Me

Unknown
View my complete profile