This is a problem that’s appeared on and off with YouTube in recent months. Normally, just tapping the spacebar when on the desktop version of YouTube acts as a nice shortcut to pause any videos you’re watching on any tabs you’ve got open.
But sometimes, it doesn’t work. And this problem has been reported more often recently. Sometimes, videos don’t pause pressing the spacebar, and annoying the page sometimes scrolls down instead, which being honest, no user has ever wanted to do with this shortcut to my knowledge. It’s down to a change in the way the YouTube interface works on browsers.
If the spacebar doesn’t work, try pressing the “K” key, as this now acts as the new shortcut to pause videos. Alternatively, users can manually click on the video or the Play/Pause button, which reactivates the spacebar shortcut.
And that’s really it for now. YouTube often change up the way buttons work with their platform, so it’s just a case of keeping up with the new functions and shortcuts.
If you’ve got used to using the spacebar for years to pause videos, it’ll feel weird thing trying to switch to using the K button after all this time. You’ll often find yourself just instinctively pressing the spacebar, so it’s kind of like having to break a bad habit.
It makes you wonder sometimes why YouTube doesn’t just keep things simple instead of constantly making these changes.
Why Does The Spacebar Not Pause Videos?
It should be said that the spacebar shortcut DOES sometimes still work in pausing videos. But your mouse and cursor or enter button has to be focused on the video and not anything else on the page.
There’s a number of reasons why the spacebar stops working:
- You move your mouse/cursor and click over anything other than the play/pause button on the video
- If you click on the background of the video, or any other part of the page, this seems to disable the pause, and instead the page scrolls down when you hit the spacebar.
- You switch to another tab or window
- Just leaving it some time without clicking or using the spacebar now seems to make it stop working to pause videos.
In these cases when the spacebar seems to not work, try pressing the K key instead to pause videos. This seems to be the new default shortcut that works all the time.
Other Ways Around This Problem
If you’d rather not use the K key because you’ve got so used to using the spacebar, there are some other ways around this problem:
Click on video – If you click with your mouse directly on main video panel again, this brings the video back into focus and allows you to use the spacebar to pause again.
Refresh page – Sometimes, if you just reload the page it resets the shortcuts and allows you to use the spacebar again. But you may lose where you were with the video.
Use Browser Extension – Major browsers have at least one extension that allows you to restore the spacebar pause function for YouTube. See here for an extension for Chrome (most Chrome extensions also work on the Brave and Opera browsers). See here for an extension for Firefox. Add them to your browser to revert to the way it was before for pausing videos.
Use YouTube App – Some users won’t want to do this, but switching to the app gets rid of this problem and you’re instead tapping the screen to pause videos. For people who prefer the desktop version, I hear you – I do too. But on the positive side, first time users can get a 30 day free trial of YouTube Premium, which gives you some cool features like offline videos and getting rid of all those annoying ads that play on videos.