[Bug] YouTube videos keep playing after closing the browser window

[d0sse]

When closing the DuckDuckGo browser window while a YouTube video is playing, the audio from the video continues to play in the background. This issue occurs consistently.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Open the DuckDuckGo browser.
2. Navigate to YouTube.
3. Play any video.
4. Close the browser window while the video is still playing.

Expected Behavior

The video playback should stop when the browser window is closed.

Actual Behavior

The video audio continues to play in the background even after the browser window is closed.

Environment

• DuckDuckGo Browser Version: 118.1
• Device: MacBook Pro M2 Pro
• macOS Version: macOS Sequoia 15.2 (24C101)

[freiondrej]

I think I ran into this issue in a slightly different form, so I'll post my findings here in case it is the same one.

I closed a Youtube tab (not using the Duck Player) with cmd W while the video was still playing. I still had many other tabs open, so this was not a browser window close, just one tab, but the video's audio kept playing.

I opened the Activity Monitor to investigate and saw a lot of www.youtube.com processes, which at the moment was expected because I had some other tabs with Youtube. I closed those tabs in the browser with the expectation that I'll only be left with one YT process remaining in the Activity Monitor, however multiple YT processes stayed there, as if dangling (could this be a garbage collection problem, leading to slowly growing RAM consumption over time?). I killed those with Force terminate (non-force termination did not have any effect) and at one point I hit the one which kept playing in the background, so the playback finally stopped at that point.

(Browser version and macOS version identical as @d0sse reported)