I've seen a lot of discussion about YouTube banning adblockers, but as a user of Firefox + uBO, I have never seen it happen for me. Perhaps the Firefox extension ecosystem makes it easier to push blocklist updates or something. Or YouTube's detection is browser-specific and they bothered with the largest first.
Google will make a change to its ads to get around the adblockers, but no change they make gets deployed all at once.
Instead they spread their updates over users 0.1% at a time over an hour or so. That way if youtube stops working for that fraction of users, they can cancel and rollback the update.
Sometimes this means that you might be in that tiny fraction of users who gets a change before the devs who maintain the UBO lists, and sometimes that change is related to ads.
(It's only happened to me twice in the last 2 years)
In this case, you don't need to mess around with other extensions, you just need to wait an hour or so until those devs have seen Google's changes and they can push their own updates to reblock the new ads.
If you want it to go faster, you can go to the github issues pages for the filterlists and they have instructions for how to get uBlock Origin to generate a blob of debug info to post on github to speed up their updates.
Interesting, thanks for the insights. The next time I feel frustrated enough I'll have to do that.
Part of me was considering just self-hosting an alternative YT frontend. At this point I'm sorta happy with how YT slowly has decreased its usage in my life
They need to just give up and stop fighting the ad-blockers: they can't win, unless they try to force everyone to use a special app to watch YouTube, which obviously isn't going to fly.
There's plenty of losers out there who can't or won't use ad-blockers that they can make their ad money on; trying to harass the 20% of users who use ad-blockers is just an arms race they can't win.
Are you logged in to Youtube? People are saying that the YouTube anti-blocking measures are kicking in for logged-in users, but not for anonymous users.
Yes, there is no question about that the uBlock Origin works regardless of your YouTube session status. The question is whether YouTube's countermeasures kick in or not: nagging you to turn it off, or stop playback.
The issue isn't whether you see ads or not, but whether YouTube is nagging you to turn off your ad blocking on threat of video playback being suspended after a few videos.
I saw the popup a month or so ago for the first time, and 10 days ago after that. Simply manually updating uBlockOrigin filters did it for me both times.
Not necessarily, if you kept your filters and extension up-to-date, you won't see that pop-up either. uBlock handles it just fine. During early days of YT trying to force me to disable it, all I had to do is to open the settings, update filters and it was just fine. Thankfully it's been peaceful now for long time.
I got that modal for some time, switched to yt-dlp for that time, and now I get zero ads or modals again with FF/uBlock. Not sure what they are doing, maybe I'm just lucky.
I noticed it only when logged in. When logged out my UBlock works perfectly. (Note, I havn't logged in for a while, so maybe the situation has improved in the meantime) (Firefox)
Nothing, it works just fine for now for me too. I'd still recommand an open source app called NewPipe over YouTube on FireFox, it seems way less hungry battery-wise... and there is likely also less data collection happening.
Oh! Thank you! I knew of NewPipe SponsorBlock but thought it wasn't in F-Droid because the F-Droid folks didn't like that it calls out to the SponsorBlock service. I didn't realize that it was possible to add custom repositories to F-Droid, so now I've done that and it seems to have linked up perfectly. TIL; thanks!
It provides the ability to skip ads without pressing the 'L' key. Meaning that one doesn't have to be at the keyboard to press anything. It also skips to the end of the ad, so you never have to use the 'J' key if you pressed 'L' too many times or if the ad finished 9 seconds ago.
I also prefer NewPipe for longer videos, especially ones I only need audio for. I share to it from the Youtube app typically, which has been getting more and more annoying (from one tap to 3 right now).
it's a tiered rollout. I also had no issues until a few weeks ago. but I usually just need to update the unlock lists and do a hard refresh and I will be back in business for a few days.
