How to disable “YouTube.com is now fullscreen. Press Esc at any time to exit” message in Firefox

When you are watching a YouTube video in Mozilla Firefox, every time you switch to fullscreen mode, the browser shows the following message: YouTube.com is now fullscreen. Press Esc at any time to exit. If you are not happy to see this message, here is how to disable it.

youtube now in fullscreen
To disable the message "YouTube.com is now fullscreen. Press Esc at any time to exit" in Firefox, you need to do the following:

  1. Run Firefox, open a new tab and enter the following text in the address bar:
    about:config

    Confirm that you will be careful if a warning message appears for you.

  2. Enter the following text in the filter box:
    full-screen-api.approval-required
  3. You will see the parameter full-screen-api.approval-required. Set it to false.

That's it. To re-enable this message, set this parameter back to true. (via Techdows)

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Author: Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

26 thoughts on “How to disable “YouTube.com is now fullscreen. Press Esc at any time to exit” message in Firefox”

  1. This is great, thanks! Was that message actually intended to protect me from a real threat?

      1. not really — just a measure to protect knuckledraggers from losing data (not figuring out how to use the Esc key and just using the power switch) to escape the fullscreen window.

    1. For Chrome, type in your address bar this:
      chrome://settings/contentExceptions#fullscreen
      Then change the name of the site (for example Youtube) to *://*/* and save the edit. It works for me so far. Good luck !

        1. Yes but it doesn’t ask anymore if you to accept or not. This notification goes away after one second. No need to click.

  2. How does this help anyone? The idea is to prevent fullscreen mode altogether, because when I click several times on a vid, I do it to pause/unpause, not fiddle around with a dumb fullscreen mode. If I wanted fullscreen I’d want a separate button to make it full screen (the latter is doable with the viewtube userscript)

    1. Try using the space-bar instead to pause/resume, it’s much more convenient; of course, if you don’t want to use fullscreen don’t use the fullscreen button or F12.

  3. thank you so much for this. youtube didnt use to incessantly do that message,. just started for me when i upgraded to win 7 pro from win xp. my other problem now after the win 7 upgrading is when i zoom in the monitor, the youtube comment section disappears. how fix? ( i watch from 10′ away with cordless keyboard and mouse and in order to see to write a comment i need to zoom in). used to work fine for a year with win xp, now with win 7 it only zooms in so far then one more ctrl+ the comments section disappears.

  4. Thanks — this is a terrific feature, and it works on all the websites I’ve tried so far to get rid of those annoying popup reminders and confirmation dialogs. Is there an option for Edge as well ?

  5. Does not work anymore in FF 42!!! The setting is gone! SCREW THAT!
    At least you can remove this annoying transition animation!
    full-screen-api.transition

    1. Update to firefox 43.0.1

      go to about:config

      scroll down to full-screen-api.warning.timeout => 3000

      Setting that to 0 (zero milliseconds) will disable the message.

  6. if you are still using Firefox 42.0, you can try the add-on Disable HTML5 Fullscreen Alert,
    or you could download the latest version 43 (beta) which has a new option:
    about:config > full-screen-api.warning.timeout
    which you can set to ‘0’ for the desired effect.

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