I do think YouTube waits until you activate the tab, or Firefox is blocking the autoplay until you activate the tab.

The problems when you switch away from the tab are more troubling. I've seen reports along those lines on Reddit, but there was no definitive explanation or solution mentioned; there are some possible settings to look at:

• Second stream freezes/hangs - Firefox 61 beta??
• Switching tabs causes stream(s) in inactive tab to buffer - Firefox 61 beta
• When a video stream is not in a focused tab, it will start to buffer and eventually stop completely - Firefox 59 and earlier

Raliden said

Whenever I open a site with media on it (Twitch, Youtube, etc.) The contents of the page will not load until I bring that Tab/Window into focus if I am watching something else.
...
If I try and let Youtube autoplay music while I have a livestream open and Youtube's Auto-play feature is on, it will go to the next video but will not load it.

For those issues, could you test this change:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button promising to be careful or accepting the risk.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste autop and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground preference to switch the value from true to false

I attempted all of the recommendations, but none seemed to have worked. Like i said before the most recent update I have been able to run Youtube on autoplay without the need to focus in on it. (Other then the one time I have to either click the play button on the tab itself or focus on the page once.)

Hi, just wondering if anything is stealing your bandwidth, please check :

• https://www.malwarebytes.com/

I know that isnt an issue. as I have checked by downloading a game off of Steam and having a stream open to see if my streams buffer but they do not.

So you think your clean, great.

I ended up doing a Virus scan to make sure everything is alright and I got no hits. Could not do it yesterday due to family matters.

I went ahead to see if it was Firefox's recent update that started causing the issue by installing an older version and it seems to be the case, but I do not want to get ahead of my self. I will be monitoring it if the same problem will pop back up.

See next reply for a better tweak

On Reddit (Is there any way to prevent inactive tab suspension?), a couple users reported that changing this preference kept the data flowing to the background tabs:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button promising to be careful or accepting the risk.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste throttle and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the network.http.throttle.enable preference to switch the value from true to false

I have not tested that myself. If you don't have enough bandwidth, I suspect all tabs would suffer.

A couple other users in the thread reported success disabling the page from detecting that it was no longer the active tab. So... YMMV.

There is a different setting marked as the solution in this thread -- it backs off the throttling without completely disabling it: https://support.mozilla.org/questions/1224759