YouTube’s Different Modes: Page Focused, Player Focused, and Full Screen Thankfully, you should never have to use spacebar to control YouTube: it has its own special keyboard shortcuts built-in. Why do browsers use the spacebar as a standard shortcut for page scrolling rather than just using the arrow keys? Your guess is as good as mine, but it’s a standard shortcut in nearly all browsers. If the player isn’t in focus, it’ll use your browser’s default spacebar behavior: scrolling down the page. There’s one catch, though: pressing spacebar only pauses when the player is focused or in Full Screen. Like other media players, YouTube also allows you to press the spacebar for play/pause, because that’s what everyone else does. During that time, other media players were using Ctrl+P as the method to control this function but eventually practically all media players adopted the spacebar convention. It’s hard to tell where this started, but in my research, I found references to both RealPlayer and QuickTime as far back as 2001. Most, if not all, media players available today, including video streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Instant Video, utilize the spacebar as the shortcut for playing and pausing media. You’ve essentially been programmed to use the spacebar through a gradual and likely accidental form of Behavioral Engineering. Why Does Pressing the Spacebar Jump Down the Page?
