youtube on chromebook browser changed

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Why?

Up until yesterday I could press play on a youtube video and it would continue playing if I switched to a different browser tab. That way I could listen to whatever the song was or whatever. Now if I switch tabs it stops playing, and when I go back to the youtube tab it restarts the video from the beginning.

Did youtube just change things up to force people to watch their ads vs. listen to audio w/o being obligated to see their visuals?

Or is there some setting somewhere that changed that can be reverted back on my google chrome browser? Couldn't find anything in the settings that sounded like it fit even remotely.

Just started YouTube Premium, I don't have a Chromebook to test with though. Never had a problem with regular desktop Chrome though, I would switch tabs and it still plays. Premium just took care of the ads.

I have the same issue on one of my mobiles. I thought it might be because of some setting that stops background running on my mobile. I both upgraded and downgraded my Chrome browser, and messed with the settings that lower battery use and use of data\lite mode.
Nothing seems to work. On this phone I have the issue of video never playing in the BG while Desktop mode is on, I think it's a software or hardware error. I could never fix this, it might be the phone that has all these video issues.

Huh, my laptop can play YouTube videos on different tabs pretty well. Then again I use a Windows laptop. (Still use Chrome though.)

Googled and it's a chrome for chromebooks thing - video in the background doesn't get played to save resources. Used to be a fix but now it doesn't work/isn't available. A couple other workarounds have been done, but those aren't options on mine. Closed all those tabs because whatever, apparently the fix is to use Firefox.. and now, for some reason, there's some youtube video playing just fine in the background of another tab rn - why? I dunno. But I very highly doubt it's content related - but just to be sure I'm gonna go over to that tab and try to play what I wanted to yesterday.

Wtf? Seems to be working now.. dunno why. Maybe I willed it back into existence!

You can run another Linux distro on your Chromebook and get regular desktop Chrome on that. That's if this is a big issue for you.
For me Chrome OS never satisfied the full range of my needs.

WTF indeed. Weird stuff. I would have been puzzled too.

It's not an ideal fix, but if you don't run Android apps, and those sorts of weird updates start to bother you too much, you could switch to GalliumOS. It has some annoying things about it (it's Linux, after all... there's always some random annoying thing that you used to take for granted), but I can still do all the things I normally do, and I can also stream games (or work-related stuff too) from my desktop through Parsec. As a bonus, I can also run retro games from Steam on the laptop itself. My Chromebook is a very non-impressive one, so I assume the same things also apply to other Chromebooks in general.

I'm a super basic user. Never modified any OS ever. Don't really care to learn how, either. Simple cheap out of the box type user. If $ were no object I'd drop $2k on a macbook, but, I like money more than I like macbooks.. so, I bought the display model of the cheapest chromebook Staples sells here. I can put up with a couple minor inconveniences like it not being able to connect to the wifi printer we have at home for the fact that it was only ~$300cdn all in.

Yeah in that case Linux is probably out of the question. You could most likely get it to run safely and without much effort, but there's always the "Linux tax" of having to figure out how to make that key at the corner of your keyboard work again because for some completely mystifyingly random reason it just won't, or some s**t like that. And with Chrome OS you just have to accept what you're given, unfortunately.

Though maybe you could install the Android version of another browser if you needed. I never tried it.