uBlock Origin 1.53
github.comFrom the “uBO works best in Firefox” page, I found this gem:
> Firefox will wait for uBO to be ready before sending network requests from already opened tab(s) at browser launch.
> In Chromium-based browsers, this is not the case. Tracker/advertisement payloads may find their way into already opened tabs before uBO is ready, while Firefox will properly filter these.
That’s a hell of a “bug” in Chromium, that blocker initialization has a race condition with restoring the last opened tabs. What a weird little “accident” that Chromium just moves forward and loads all the trackers, “oopsie”. I wonder which kind of promotion the engineer who made that “mistake” has been awarded.
Ad nauseum solves this. Sure you get tracked but you also send all the wrong signals.
Ad nauseam is "weirdly" banned from the chrome store. Guess it hurts them :)
Especially, because it clicks ads without you seeing them
That is a neat idea, going to give it a try.
Can’t you sideload applications like a hacker?
Our computing landscape has deteriorated if installing an application/extension outside of a walled garden makes you a "hacker."
I believe the comment was facetious.
depends how high the walls are I guess. One other way to look at it is, if 99% of users cannot do it, then it's a hack =) aka users have becomed dumbed down by walled garden...
I'll give a warning with that, the traffic generated by adnausem starts to get cloudflare suspicious and then you end up having 1/2 of the internet made inaccessible because Cloudflare decided at some point you are a bad actor and you're pretty much hosed from that point on.
The city of Palo Alto's website is "protected" by some cloudflare clone wannabe. It somehow decided that my residential ip address (also in Palo Alto) is a threat and I can't access any city website now. Just get an infinite loop of "are you human?" challenges.
My workaround is to use Tor. That sails right through.
Excellent job. My tax dollars at work.
Good thing I get my internet access from a major internet service provider that stuck me behind a carrier-grade NAT!
How does Ad nauseum solve this? It seems you failed to understand this technical issue. Ad nauseam is build on uBlock and suffers from the same issues does it not? I have not looked into it, but it seems it's a technical limitation that lets connections go through b4 an extension is fully loaded and hooked in to be able to block them. So just by my common sense, a fork of UBO would suffer from the same issue.
Anti ad block feature, not a bug I guess.
K
I would expect nothing less than an immediate promotion to the next title. So cool.
Thanks. Good to know. Solidifies my belief that additionally using Pi-Hole can only improve things.
It helps, but it also misses a lot, it's really better to use multiple layers
For now, hopefully DoH/DoT isn't forced upon us
It already has been but the workarounds are known and, for now, I haven’t run into anything that doesn’t fall back to (usually system) udp dns.
Which is a horrible design on Android. Firefox on my (admittedly relatively old) phone take 20s to load the first page when browser start with uBlock enabled. On desktop this is fine as it only happen once a day. But on the phone it happen a lot since apps getting killed is a normal thing.
I have the same issue with UBlock Origin since my phone is quite aggressive when killing apps. While it is indeed annoying, I don't think it's a bad design.
Maybe it's lacking a setting to toggle this (Suspend all network until lists are loaded doesn't control this behavior), but I wouldn't want to load pages full of ads on mobile simply because the app got killed.
The real issue for me is my phone killing applications when it has both battery and memory available.
Chrome desktop since v110 has started killing background tabs and reloading them upon use. [1]
Lately, I've noticed Chrome being really aggressive about this.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/chrome-110-will-auto...
I'm on the regular stable Chrome build and was explicitly asked on several devices over the last few months if I wanted to enable memory saver or not, it wasn't automatic for me at least.
My 4 year old S10E does not exhibit this behavior at all (Firefox with uBlock).
S10e was the peak of mobile design.
Any phone without an IR Blaster can not be the peak of mobile design. Note 4 master mobile.
I feel the same about my s7 edge I keep as a spare, although currently using the s21 ultra and no complaints
S22, I had to find a way to exclude Firefox from memory management altogether, because the auto-killing behavior was getting ridiculous. Unfortunately, there is still no way to prevent Firefox itself from unloading tabs.
I know I'm in the minority, but I consider both of these behaviors to be a very bad and extremely frustrating idea.
Preach! I'm holding onto it for dear life, perfect form factor, no BS.
I could've done without the useless Samsung button that doesn't do anything but whine for a Samsung account before you can change the behavior of the button. So I used adb to disable the button entirely, to prevent the whiny Samsung page from accidentally being pressed on the button raised off the left side of the s10e.
Why was it that?
Small form factor, powerful enough to keep working fine today (as long as not gaming), has DeX, has audio jack, physical fingerprint reader sideways, and samsung support (no glitches for important apps)
But it has some pretty big downsides, the battery is small, and it is rather bad at this point of life. The audiojack has been oversized by constant use and barely holds now the headphone, stuck in Android 12.
And my 7 years old oneplus 3T neither
Do you mind sharing your ubo settings?
Just the default one plus french list in regional settings. To be fair though, I had a tablet from the same time but it was way cheaper than this phone, specifically having way less ram and firefox was not really usable.
Do you mind sharing your ubo settings?
Whatever the defaults are after installation, I didn't adjust the settings at all.
I don't get this behaviour on Firefox in Android at all.
Do you mind sharing your ubo settings?
I didn't change anything - just the default settings. Phone is a pixel 6a.
IIRC there's a setting for that in UBo (look for pre-fetching)
I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that’s a different thing altogether.
Edit:
Yeah, disabling prefetch:
> This will ensure no TCP connection is opened at all for blocked requests: It's for your own protection privacy-wise.
uBlock holds itself (ideally) to a higher standard than not executing js or hiding an element, it tries to prevent the network connections from even taking place. This is for browser prefetching that happens on many pages even after the environment and extensions are fully loaded, in many different contexts, to speed up requests by having the binary payload of the response already available in cache before it is needed.
I'm already allowing prefetching
i'm pretty sure there's an setting/option to disable battery optimization for firefox
In fact there are multiple switches you have to turn, however I've made sure to check all of them.
I have experienced this on firefox as well but it is rare and don't know of a way to reproduce it.
Are you sure you don't have the option to wait turned off in the UBo settings?
It looks like one of the changes improves this:
I thought chromium was open source?
If this "feature" is intentional, then even though it's open source, your patch to fix the behavior may not be accepted.
Shooting from the hip, here but part of it is. Other parts are closed source from Google or some other group that doesn't share.
> What a weird little “accident” that Chromium just moves forward and loads all the trackers, “oopsie”. I wonder which kind of promotion the engineer who made that “mistake” has been awarded.
This "bug" is in Safari/Webkit too, stop it with the conspiracy theory.
You realize that Apple is ad company too, right? Just like every other shitty tech company these days. Apple generated $5 billion in ad revenue in 2022.
From the app store ads mainly. Omitting this fact is dishonest at best.
I think they are requiring apps on their store use ads provided by their store as well though.
They are not. For example Unity has their own ad network for Unity made games to use (even on Apple devices).
They are not, as far as I can tell (as someone who is breaking this rule were it to exist)
This is not true.
How much was from outside the app store?
I think $5b is a gross underestimate.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/26/23933206/google-apple-se...
I've been using uBlock since shortly after it launched, and I'd rather lose access to all Google services than not have an ad blocker. I seriously question how people use a browser without one. Completely changes how the web feels.
It’s crazy. Even with an adblocker you are subjected to a crazy amount of ads or hostile design. With ads, it’s just a free for all on your attention.
and for your cpu. Ads are the number one killer of performance.
And money. Metered connections do exist, and ads consume a lot of bandwidth which is not free.
The cognitive load is the worst part of ads for me. The amounts of ads that display an X to close the banner only for that X to be an actual link to another fkn ad or straight up opens a new tab. Not to mention the invisible divs spanning the entire page so wherever you click, it's gonna open a link which is most of time either porn, betting sites or aliexpress. This sh* should be illegal.
Yup. They're pollution. (There's gotta be a phrase for "cognitive load" + "pollution".)
I used to love tech ads. I'd inspect every ad in BYTE, Creative Computing, etc. I'd even buy Computer Shopper, a massive catalog interrupted by some articles, just for the ads.
Ads can be useful, informative, and engaging. I wouldn't mind that.
I like the term “information pollution”.
Oh and the list goes on. Click hijacking. Redirect soup. 1024 JavaScript tags that record the same events, only they all await each other. CNAME shenanigans. Unsubscribe really means subscribe to 1000 more. Request interception, email interception, email link rewrites in flight, await request to dead dns adserver with no timeout set making your page a hostage requiring closing the tab/browser and visiting page again.
I dont press the x, I use uBlocks ZAP feature to close unwanted elements.
I used something similar on Firefox to block unwanted divs from Facebook and Reddit but now Safari is my main browser and I haven't come across an extension that does that.
I wonder what the CO2 emissions of all these ads are?
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7080/8/2/18
Although this study doesn't discuss C02 emissions, it does discuss energy use and the potential impact of internet advertising.
Unfortunately, it only discusses the impact on client-side devices, the energy consumption of hardware used to serve advertisements (networking, servers) is left to a future study.
>Strikingly, uBlock Origin has the potential to save the average global Internet user more than 100 h annually.
>So, for example, the 1.35 × 1010 kWh saved globally for using uBlock Origin is equivalent to more than 1.0% of the electricity generated per year from coal in the United States, which is responsible for the premature deaths of about 52,000 American every year from air pollution [43,44].
>Globally, the results with the most efficient open source ad blocker tested, uBlock Origin, would be even more substantial: ad blocking would save consumers more than $1.8 billion/year.
Wow, that is a mind-blowing figure. $1.8 billion/year and 100 h annually. Would've never expected the figure to be that large.
So many people so concerned about CO2 emissions from computing devices... all the way down to Microsoft setting the default timeout for Bluetooth on Windows 11 to ONE MINUTE. It took me 2 weeks of hair pulling and updating everything before I realized why my mouse and keyboard would stop working, because it NEVER occurred to me in my WILDEST dreams that an OS developer would be given the insane task of creating a timeout like this, and writing a UI to control it. Then I realized that some middle manager in the guts of Microsoft probably got a bonus by being able to tell his management that "Microsoft" was now saving a collective million pennies a year of energy costs by crippling this basic feature. Well done, guys.
Where's the outrage from the colossal carbon footprint of the overarching, advertising-based economy? Does anyone have any idea what the electrical costs or carbon footprint per dollar of ad revenue is? It surely must be one of the lowest returns per environmental impact in the entire spectrum of capitalism. Sure, complain about cryptocurrency "setting the earth on fire," but Google gets a free pass for much the same thing to make their trillions?
Or, for that matter, any incremental call Microsoft is making to any GPT-based model. The power consumption from these inferences are immense, and appearing everywhere in their interfaces.
Or, for that matter, any incremental call Microsoft is making to any GPT-based model. The power consumption from these inferences are immense, and appearing with increased frequency.
True, I wonder how much power the inefficient "Windows Update" uses every month, too.
I can hear the fans on my Windows machine spin up, and I know it's Windows Update time.
A lot, given the sheer number of network requests a single ad can spawn
"A lot", compared to what? A single household? Probably. As a percentage of overall global electricity consumption? Probably negligible.
Some math with conservative estimates:
* power consumption of mobile processor: 5W
* daily ad use: 1 hour (assume it's 100% cpu for the entire time)
* smartphone users: 7.8 billion (world population)
Total yearly electricity consumption given the above: 2.8 TWh
World electricity consumption: 23,921 TWh in 2019
You'd have to include the servers doing the auctions, sentiment analysis, profiling,... into it as well. And then the whole ad industry, every email, every meeting, ...
I don't think you can actually put a number on this waste.
>You'd have to include the servers doing the auctions, sentiment analysis, profiling,... into it as well.
Feel free to put up an estimate then.
>I don't think you can actually put a number on this waste.
Well that just makes it clear you're only interested in your feelings/vibes as opposed to anything objective.
You have to include the fact that the very clear objective of advertising is to make you consume more. Thus producing more pollution than if there were no ads.
So, even if advertising was technically neutral (which is clearly not the case), it would still be an ecological cataclysm.
One would even argue that the whole climate emergency is created by our advertise/consume culture.
That, plus the industry exists to support a negative-sum game. Past some degree of market or channel or target saturation, the only thing your ad spend does is cancels out the ad spend of your competitors. That, and it fuels the growth of an industry that's happy to enjoy the infinite money printer.
And the services needed to consume said money printer. GCP wouldn’t exist. To be fair, a lot of it runs on AWS so AWS’ business would take a serious hit as well.
careful now, you can't make cents without advertising dollars. (pun)
>Well that just makes it clear you're only interested in your feelings/vibes as opposed to anything objective.
Pulling an "estimate" out of your ass isn't exactly any more objective than admitting that attempting to estimate it is futile.
"I know that I know nothing" and all that.
> I don't think you can actually put a number on this waste.
To give a really simple upper limit: 36.8 billion tonnes per year. Because that's the current total global CO2 emissions per year. And we can be pretty sure that ads are less than that, or at least not more.
I agree with your assessment of the grandparent comment.
hostile design, maybe? i use pihole and ublock and it's really rare that I see an ad on any of my devices. What am I doing wrong?
This. I've pretty much stopped using YouTube since the adblocker blocker shut me out.
I figure it's a good time to kick a bad habit. :D
I'm trying Grayjay, which works great, and I've noticed one big thing: it doesn't keep showing me an endless stream of stuff to keep me on the site. It just shows my subs and a handful of suggestions.
As a consequence, my time spent on the site is way down, and the time I do spend is higher quality material.
But I'm with you. There's no way I'm watching an ad on YT. If they figure out how to only stream with unblockable ads, I will never visit the site again.
Patreon to pay the creators.
I think Grayjay is a great idea. Many creators have alternate accounts on platfroms like Odyssey (e.g. Hardware Unboxed and Veritasium), in those cases you can subscribe to the non-youtube platform. If enough people do this, it might help us move away from youtube. Of course the last step is also important for this to work (Pay the creators.)
>If they figure out how to only stream with unblockable ads, I will never visit the site again
That's their goal. If you're not earning them money, they don't want you. You don't exist to them and you not watching their ads/videos is no threat at all.
It's a win-win!
Fine with me. I'm not threatening--just stating with clarity that they will not get a dime in any case.
> As a consequence, my time spent on the site is way down, and the time I do spend is higher quality material.
For me, I've found DeArrow (clickbait "blocker") has had exactly the same effect. I find myself no longer mindlessly scrolling through the suggested feed and am more particular about what I choose to watch.
What does Grayjay do? Is it some kind of aggregator?
Same. I only visit when someone links to a video or I absolutely have to to get information.
Used to visit YouTube’s front page as part of my daily routine, effectively using it as a social media site - which it definitely is; it’s just that the posts are all videos, the comment section is like every other but moderated by the video poster, and the front page is completely algorithm driven.
One thing which seriously improves my experience is using the "Block element" feature on non-ads as well. Suggested videos, youtube shorts, banners, etc, all get blocked. Leaves the site much more lean and leaves less distracting visual clutter.
I use this strategy on a lot of sites (which sadly includes stackoverflow lately).
You might wanna use Unhook.
Potentially, for now I can get away with my custom filter list :)
I generally try to limit the total amount of extensions I have on my browser, to a list of tools I feel that I can trust. I apply the same mentality for dependencies in my software. Limits the surface area for supply chain attacks.
How do you use the Block element feature? I looked in the uBO menu but cannot find how to do it. Can you give an overview, please?
When you right-click an element on the page (and you have uBlock installed at default settings) there should be a dialog for it at the bottom.
If I right click on an item I get a block element option in the context menu. But that doesn't seem to make them persist. I usually use it to make irritating popups go away that I'm to lazy to read or that seem intentionally confusing since it is less mental load to just zap it blindly.
Thanks to all who replied. I will check the suggestions out.
Oddly, I had the soft warning first.. then 3 views until blocked warning... and now, nothing. Working like it did before. Strange. I don't feel relaxed yet, but it seems they back-off if you hold-out, for now.
It's randomly on and off for me since a couple of weeks.
I'm not seeing any YouTube adds. I'm using ublock origin with firefox and didn't do anything special. What YouTube adds are everyone talking about?
They have been rolling out ad-blocker detection with warning popups telling you to disable it. Mine were skippable the first few times but that lead to a final 3 warnings with the player refusing to load after. They seem to be doing a lot of A/B testing with the system currently.
Turn off Ublock, reload the page, then turn it back on. Usually solves the problem for me.
you can block the detection popup itself with uBlock. Seems to have done the trick for me.
No don't do that. And stop spreading misinformation. There is a thread on Reddit explaining why this is absolutely stupid and will only result in you losing access to YouTube. Or do you really think YouTubes for works like this.
The biggest problem currently are people spreading those types of misinformation see https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/17j6ygs/youtu...
How would one lose access? Is Youtube blocking IP addresses? Fingerprinting browsers in a way that Firefox's ResistFingerprinting setting doesn't handle?
The biggest problem is people playing YouTube's game. Let them block all their users, by all means. That can only lead to good things.
How is that misinformation? The site you linked even says it works, just not for long an maybe with negative side effects:
> I was able to hide the popup simply by blocking it with uBO's Picker. Why aren't you doing that?
> This only works temporarily. For stages 1-3. You're still reach stage 4 by doing this. And this might cause scrolling issues and not let videos autoplay.
Maybe you should stop using words as "absolutely stupid" because it makes you look like a snob, and when it turns out you were wrong, it makes you look like a fool.
Seems to be not hitting every user the same way. I also did not have any direct message about ad blockers, but I did notice videos not loading correctly and requiring a page refresh to work. Updating uBlock seemed to fix that issue. It was only afterwards that I heard of others having problems.
In my experience, it ahs not been hitting super users. But somehow they have been targeting people with adblock installed by someone else.
My parents both have been targeted and had to instruct them on how to refresh the quick updates, which has not been easy.
I still use adblocker on everything else and I know YT without adblock / premium is terrible.
However, YT premium is only 2-3 USD/mo in India. So, I use that to get ad-free experience on YT and also YT music is great.
You are now "paying" google twice - once with money and twice by giving them your data.
Your data is worthless if they can’t use it to show you targeted ads.
Even if you pay for Youtube, Google still shows ads in their other products (search/maps etc...). So the data is not worthless. It also gets stored forever and Google can figure out other ways to monetize it.
To be fair Youtube has to make a profit somehow. Ad revenue, direct and/or through profile data collection is easy and effective but the worst businessmodel for human sanity.
I like that they at least offer an alternative for the ad viewing part through Youtube premium. I don't know about the US as streaming services seem to have catalogues orders of magnitude more extensive than over here in Europe, but compared to the likes of Prime Video, Netflix, Apple TV+, Disney+ and several local offerings, YT Premium is a steal in terms of value proposition.
And like most here I fail to understand how anyone can stand YT with ads.
You wiil seriously start to dislike the podcasts for speaking in video ads though.
YouTube premium pricing is ridiculous. $14 a month for android and $19 a month for iOS? Get out of here
How much could they possibly make from ads in a given month off a single user. Best case scenario with a user that watches YouTube like 4 hours a day 6 days a week and clicks through once every week. $4? Probably not even that. And yet somehow YouTube premium needs to be almost $230 a year for apple users?
I bet they’d make way more with a lower premium tier that just removed ads and had no other premium features for like $20/year. Wouldn’t make as much obviously but I bet they’d do way more volume. I wonder if they have some dipshit mba arguing against something like this because it “makes them seem cheap” or “delegitimizes the platform against more traditional streaming networks” or some nonsense to justify charging Hulu prices for YouTube content
Especially when you consider you could VPN to Turkey and get it for 1.15 USD a month, if you do it for five people then it's 0.46 USD per Youtube Premium account. https://www.reddit.com/r/VPN/comments/14mwf6h/how_to_enjoy_y...
The family plan is 18€/month for 5 accounts, so about 3.60 pp. I honestly don't know if Premium has any features besides no ads and background play on mobile. There used to be a smidgen of exclusive content, but I think they gave up on that years ago.
I do not like Google's business model, nor their politics either. Thing is they do have a defacto monopoly on viable creator VoD. Yes, other services exist, but they are too fragmented to be viable.
So, do I perpetuate this situation by giving them sub money? Yes. But pragmatically I'm still not going to have my kids be subjected to ad barrages in the meantime, while rooting for true competition to emerge.
FWIW we would hate them less too.
Well I use to have them on whitelist for all these reason, but a) lately the amount of ads has gotten crazy and b) a large amount of videos are fraudulently copyright striken and revenue stolen from creators https://www.streemtunes.com/post/how-did-pewdiepie-get-a-cop...
I think it's egregious how YouTube treats content creators in general and how expect us to foot the content distribution bills in particular, especially since many of the video themselves are ads (they include product placement, or are straight up teasers for products)
I think there's a case to be made at least for non indies to pay proportionally to the minute viewed of their content, to decrease the pressure on monetizing indies.
(b) is totally ridiculous. Anyone who isn't helping bleed YouTube to death is ultimately hurting creators and keeping them locked into an abusive platform.
Also wanted to add to my previous point, ads at the beginning of the video are absolutely obnoxious. Often there are English titled video in non English language showing up on Google, and you have to go trough the ads just to discover the video is not for you, and so off you go searching another video and consuming more ads, without getting anything in return.
> To be fair Youtube has to make a profit somehow
If they were not Google, I'd be ready to pay about 10 euro/m.
Since it's Google, they can rot in hell for all I care. I'll happily freeload them as most as I can.
> To be fair Youtube has to make a profit somehow.
I don't care, I still won't watch ads, and if I pay for something, I want to pay for something for that does actively track my watching habits and sell my data, so they are out of luck.
I think you’re missing a “not” somewhere in there…
>To be fair Youtube has to make a profit somehow.
I'd gladly pay for Youtube sans ads, but not if google also gets to steal my data.
YouTube Premium isn't available worldwide.
I still don't understand how ad blocking in videos can work. I mean all it would take to force users to watch the ads is to ensure that after the ad starts streaming, you can't request any frame of the actual content until N seconds (The full ad length) later?
I'd still rather stare at a blank screen for 20s than view the ads.
Sure, but that doesn't sound like something people would install an ad blocker to achieve...
I often open videos in the background, and watch them later. So this would work perfectly well here.
ublock works perfectly for me on Youtube. I never see ads there. Plenty of sponsored videos but no ads. I use Firefox; that might be the difference.
does not work if you are logged in
It does, you just have to purge and then update the filter rules
You are just being lucky. Youtube have been rolling out new adblock filtering globally for the last few weeks.
See https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/31/23940583/youtube-ad-bloc...
This works for me too having my youtube account logged in.
Steps: click the U icon, click the gear, click filter list, click Purge, click Update.
Ads are gone again while logged in. You might have to do it again every now and then.
I am logged in.
I've gotten so much value out of YouTube over the last 15 years, I added an exception for them.
Maybe YouTube isn't the bad habit, but how (metaphorical) you use it?
Can't you copy the url and open in incognito?
If you are using Firefox you can open it in a container that is not logged into YouTube no ?
I did that a little. The friction is irritating and enough for me to walk away from the computer after only a few videos. It was just enough to break me from my normal veg and consooooom cycle.
Fair enough.
Same. I have accidentally clicked links a few times and, interestingly, I haven't seen the anti adblock message again despite not updating the uBlock filters.
For the information that only seems to be available on YouTube I use Invidious.
I have been using invidious for a while and apart from having to switch instances every few months, it's been a pleasure
Use Invidious.
A few years now since I have given up on (most) of Google's services. YouTube via Newpipe is the only exception I can think of.
But if it came between choosing between uBlock and anything? I choose uBlock!
Same. But IMHO Google would be fine with this. They aren't in the business of giving out CPU time and bandwidth for free – your data must be catalogued and correlated and sold to keep YouTube viable.
What do they gain from the 5-10% of users consuming videos but offering no salable data in return? It's a direct hit to the bottom line from a minority who would rather stop using the service than be converted to impressions. Good riddance
YouTube isn’t just a video sharing site though. It’s a social media site. There is value in people participating by replying and Liking/Disliking.
Frankly, banning ad-blockers feels like treating the symptoms rather than the cause. There is something wrong with your platform if people hate your ads so much that if they can’t block them they would rather not visit your site at all.
Youtube is an ad showing platform. All the other features are just there to get people to view ads. If you stop viewing ads you are of no value to Youtube.
If you participate in the social network, i.e. post comments and vote, you are creating some content. So your value isn't completely zero.
Which is fine. It's just that the options they offer aren't good. You either take annoying ads or pay $14 per month. How much do they make showing me ads per month? Probably not $1. If they wanted to offer me premium for $20 per year I would gladly pay and it would be win-win. As it stands I will play cat and mouse with ad blockers and they will get $0 from me.
It's just going to push the smart people with self respect to other platforms. YouTube will then cater to the captive ad tolerant audience that's left and the quality of the whole platform will degrade. More people will leave, the quality will drop, the number of ads will go up, etc. This will reduce the quality of video on YouTube until what you basically have now on reddit: a hot trash fire. Sure you can milk these people for a while, but eventually they'll follow the crowd elsewhere. Cable TV -> Netflix.
Can that progression even happen anymore? Call me cynical but I think we are long past the days of “the digg migration to Reddit”, “MySpace exodus to Facebook”, leaving vbulletin forums en masse for social media, leaving irc and Usenet for vbulletin forums, etc
How could a viable competitor to YouTube even begin to pull away YouTube’s inertia without massive vc funding? That VC would want the platform to eventually end up with the same shitty ux issues, intrusive ads, and data collection as YouTube. Guaranteed. Unless someone finds a way to store and serve tons of hi def video for free.
Not to mention even if you get past that step you’re going up against a Goliath. If you’re actually viable and potentially going to make a serious dent do you think google is just going to do nothing? They’ll leverage their gigantic market share and huge amount of resources to take you down. Whether it’s by suing you for some nonsense, replicating your service model in their own platform to recapture customers, straight up buying your platform, etc
> How could a viable competitor to YouTube even begin to pull away YouTube’s inertia without massive vc funding?
I think it depends on what people are trying to do with youtube. I doubt any one new service could replace all of it. Plenty of people want to share videos but aren't looking to get rich from it though. For them, I think a competitor that does video delivery well, but doesn't pay for views could exist.
People who want to make videos for money would have a harder time replacing google, but lots of creators get direct support already so it isn't hopeless. A lot of people are already on multiple platforms now too so it doesn't have to be a hard cut off.
It'll go to niche services. Dropout, Nebula, Curiositystream, possibly even Patreon.
Youtube will degrade and smaller competitors will not replace it because of what you said. But isn't that a progression on it's own?
It will be a shittier experience for users, but I think that's the general direction of the web anyway. Just look at other streaming companies. All of their UXs suck (as far as I have tried them on TV) and there is more and more segregation.
Your point and attitude would be applicable if YouTube wasn't a de facto monopoly due to the network effect and the Goog throwing their warchest around, effectively eliminating any semblance of a "free market." Meanwhile this monopolistic site is the only repository of massive amounts of content with cultural and practical use to society.
In the US, we’re talking about a quarter of users. That’s a lot of traffic to lose.
If they stop bundling Music, and possibly lower the cost of YT Premium, it might convert better.
Most people who work at Google use ad blockers. They agree with you that the web isn't usable without them. The hypocrisy is becoming unbearable.
I'm just visiting fewer websites/pages, i.e. those with no ads at all (like this forum) or those with less intrusive ones (such as old.reddit.com). As for websites like YT, I ended up just watching fewer videos (because of the ads).
All in all I see it as a net positive.
I run a commercial website. I built it without ads of annoyances. That's just how the web looks and feels to me.
Even SEO spam is dealt with with uBlocklist, so that the main offenders are gone. I forgot about Pinterest and all the Stackoverflow clones.
Then I use my iPad in a pinch and remember that most people are used to a much louder, annoying web. I can't believe that people use Medium without an ad blocker.
I wonder if people notice that this website is much quieter, or just enjoy it more on a subconscious level. I like to think that it's a competitive advantage.
Living without YouTube can be hard though. Almost every online tutorial, product demo, music video, or other medium and long video material gets uploaded there.
that will change once users leave. I remember times where those videos were split between Vimeo and Youtube
DNS-level blocking is even better!
A nice little Quality Of Life improvement for me with uBlock Origin recently has been using it top block Confluence's pop ups when someone has commented on a page I'm reading.
We use Confluence to do document reviews at work, and sitting there attempting to read a document while Confluence is popping up that annoying dialogue box over and over again as people comment on the doc is insanely annoying. With uBlock Origin I was able to (after a few false attempts) sniff the specific element and filter it out.
GitHub notifications blue dot for me. Not seeing it makes me click that button much less, only when I _want_ to handle notifications.
Thank you! I can't believe I never thought to do this!
I used it to block Twitter's ad bugging me to pay. Funny thing is I can't use the paid version since it's not available in my country. However, the popup kept bugging me
Agreed, I love it for things like this. Someone puts a big bright yellow and red banner on the top of confluence or Jira weeks in advance to notify about upcoming outages. I really couldn't care less about those and it's perfect to get rid of them.
For anyone looking for up-to-date information on getting YouTube ad blocking to work: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/19976
In the last year, youtube anti-ad-block only ever occurred to me once and I fixed it in 2 minutes by reading the instructions on that github issue.
All I had to do was manually trigger an update for uBlock Origin's filter lists then restart firefox.
The filter lists update automatically, but a new youtube change got around them and the filter had a fix inside an hour (too short a time for my extension to auto-update it's filter lists).
This has been continuing for the past couple months. I don't see youtube giving up tbh, and i don't see how uBO can continue to maintain a manually constructed filter every time a new mechanism is added/altered in youtube.
This is different to other ads, which is a crowdsourced list of filters, and isn't on a small or single individual to keep up. There must be a better way to utilize the crowd to make it work.
> This has been continuing for the past couple months. I don't see youtube giving up tbh, and i don't see how uBO can continue to maintain a manually constructed filter every time a new mechanism is added/altered in youtube.
If UBO stops working, I'll use newpipe, if that stops working I'll use yt-dlp and if that stops working I'll use whatever else people have come up with, and if nobody has anything that gets rid of the ads I'll just stop watching youtube.
I don't see that happening though. As long as we have computers that still work for us, I doubt google will come up with a way to stop ad blocking entirely. Maybe we'll have youtube re-release groups that manually edit out the ads and re-upload videos from popular channels to P2P sites. Maybe we'll get AI that can download videos and edit out the ads for us. We'll figure something out.
There is YT Premium
We do not negotiate with terrorists
I would think posters on HN would understand that a service costs money. Any time I can pay with money instead of with my sanity, I choose money.
It does not cost $14 a month per user to run yt, they inject their music service into the price even if people don't want or need google music. $5 would've been fine esp. considering they don't produce any of their content and even subscribed users see ads/promotions added by the creators.
> a service costs money
Ahh, but that's just it.
Youtube Premium isn't a service, it's a package.
If I could pay for Youtube by itself I would, but I can't, so I shan't.
I would have paid. But 14 per month??? Who do they think they are lmao. They can make money from unobtrusive ads but the moment they started injecting ads in the MIDDLE of videos I went straight to ad blocking. Also we're in the minority so they aren't losing that much revenue because of us.
> i don't see how uBO can continue to maintain a manually constructed filter every time a new mechanism is added/altered in youtube
Don’t underestimate what open source can and will do just to spite things they despise
For those who can't or don't want to install an ad blocker on their device, a youtube viewer bookmarklet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37973944
Low resolution, but works great. Thanks.
Ad-blocking never stopped working for me. I use a combo of uBlock Origin, uMatrix, and Unhook.
I don’t think they’ve rolled it out to everyone yet.
Currently doesn't seem to affect logged out users. So I just logged out.
One of my PCs never had an account and the ad blocker no longer works. My other PC appears to be logged into my throwaway account and the most I ever saw one message about blocking.
This explains why I haven't seen the popup yet. I'm logged out on FF, logged in on Chrome (I have premium), but do all casual YT viewing in FF.
uMatrix breaks so much across the entire internet that I feel like it has an effect here. But I haven't done any tests to confirm that.
They haven't. I was hit just last week.
I used to use uMatrix before it ceased development, but eventually switched over to only uBlock advanced mode. Do you find it still works fine? What cases do you keep uMatrix around for?
The UI is superior, in my opinion. Better colours; much clearer about which connections are made or attempted; less interaction with typing out rules or looking at such rules.
If I could get the uMatrix "skin" on top of uBlock Origin that would be great.
Yep, and uBO is low resolution compared to uMatrix. I rejoice in being able to decide whether CSS, XHR, scripts, etc should be allowed on each domain. uBO doesn't get that fine grained even in advanced mode
uBO + uMatrix, got the nag and the 3-video warning. Adding "uBlock filters – Annoyances" fixed it for me.
As far as I can tell, they are leaving Silicon Valley IPs to the end of the rollout.
this is untrue. located in the bay area and getting dinged hard on most of my devices
Interesting. Maybe it is Google Fiber in Bay Area, or something more specific like that.
I get it on my devices when I travel outside Bay Area and my friends everywhere else are getting the treatment that people are complaining about.
But with just uBlock Origin, haven't seen anything pertaining ads on YouTube on Google Fiber in Bay Area.
AdBlocker Ultimate still works. I just blocked the nagging popup element.
Note that this release is not, as of this comment, finished being published and approved in any of the four browser app stores, so you may not see the new version when using check for updates (if you installed the normal way) until they’ve finished the release process.
https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/17kw0vc/ubloc... has the usual “it hasn’t completed review yet” guidances as well how to rush ahead of the app stores for those that are impatient.
"uBO works best on Firefox". I can't say I'm totally shocked that getting it working better under Chrome is somehow more difficult.
Chrome now aggressively blocks ad blockers on YouTube.com
YouTube's new anti-adblocking has nothing to do with which browser you're using
Hmmm source?
I know youtube does but I didnt know Chrome does.
Site and browser owned by the largest ad company in the world don't want you to block ads.
News at 11.
(If you disagree, don't just click the down arrow, argue your point.)
Consider making a coherent argument maybe? I asked whether for sources on a specific (and, if true, unprecedented) accusation, and you say some generalities that, I think, imply that of course they would do that! That doesn’t address my question at all. But to be fair I’m not even sure that that was your argument.
It’s customary on HN to downvote comments without much substance. (Fwiw I didn’t downvote it)
What triggers this? I use adnauseum on Firefox and I haven’t seen a YouTube blocker warning in weeks. Not sure why it is so intermittent.
Prove it.
uBlock Origin is a recommended extension[1]
Recommended extensions undergo full code review by staff security experts to provide a strong additional security check.
[1] - https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/extensions-addo...
uBlock Origin – Wiki : https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki
I’m really surprised 1Password isn’t recommended.
Yesterday I figured out how to block cards in my LI feed that contained certain words. Here's the one for things containing "excited to"
``` www.linkedin.com##.relative:has-text(/excited to/i)```
between that, blocking images, and user taglines my feed is much more concise and readable.
This is cool, but sincere question: what is even left after you block all the fluff? I rarely bother to go to my LinkedIn feed, but when I do it's all fluff that I don't need to see. Is there actually value buried somewhere under there?
IMO I care much more about contacts changing jobs, getting laid off, and talking about their side projects than anything else.
I probably should see if someone has a linkedin script to remove non-1st connection content.
Is there something significant about this release? I read the changelog but nothing really stands out to me.
I was going to ask the same thing. Why is this on the top of the front page?
Wondering the same. Will it bypass YouTube latest efforts
I think they made it a lot easier for people to keep up to date with the YT fixes. They added a feature for clicking a specially crafted URL to update a specific filter list. That will allow them to tell people who get the YT popup to “just click this link”.
uBlock Origin can also be used to modify the DOM or CSS in specific URLs via its "My Filters" screen.
For instance, I use it to switch HackerNews to dark mode, and restrict the width of comments to about 10-12 words: https://gist.github.com/aclarknexient/c39c83f2f97c3c6b1c307c...
It's a great alternative to GreaseMonkey or other user style extensions.
Thanks for the gist.
I tweaked it a tiny bit since overscroll on FF on osx was showing as white, figured I'd share it back. It's not perfect, but the BG color differences are close enough to not bother me.
! Invert the colours of the site, making a dark mode that I like ! `invert(95%)` does most of the work, ! but you can tweak the hue-rotate value to fine tune the colours news.ycombinator.com##body:style(filter:invert(95%) hue-rotate(200deg); background: white) news.ycombinator.com##html:style(background: black)`Hey that's good stuff, thank you!
gorhill should be given a Nobel Prize and a knighthood for contributions to humanity.
How many Kilowatts has this man saved by computers not having to load trackers and render ad banners!?
I think the electricity savings pale compared to the value of human time saved.
It's both: the borrow terminology from the MBAs, it's a win-win situation!
Yes and: apparently the moderators on reddit's r/ublock have been having rough time. At least one has quit and deleted their account because of abusive users.
No good deed goes unpunished.
Is r/ublock even needed? What is it for?
In general, I view Reddit as a complete cesspool; I'm not really sure what any sub there really needs to exist. Most OSS projects get along just fine without it (in fact, I've never heard of one that used it).
I mean, it sucks that abusive users are out there, but it is Reddit after all. For communications with users, I think the old-style method of having Bugzilla and requiring an account to file bugs is probably the best.
I can't imagine browsing the internet without uBlock installed. I honestly don't think I could.
No kidding. How do we thank this person? Compensate the effort?
he has explicitly denied the option for donations, which is excellent moral standing from my POV. However, it does beg the question - how can the community reward people who want to do this sort of work?
Perhaps a gigantic status of him standing over a harbor? Or a national holiday?
We should also not forget to give accolades to the heroic people who tirelessly maintain the filter lists.
Accolades and money - Mr. Gorhill asks us to consider donating to the filter list maintainers instead if we want to give money to uBO.
Do you have a link or is this donating to each individual?
I guess each individual filter list; you can check your uBO settings to see which ones you use.
Unsure of provenance for this link, but it shows your browser's current success / failure state for blocking youtube anti-adware efforts.
It's not actually showing success in blocking - it's showing whether uBO's filters are up-to-date with the latest youtube scripts. It is possible that youtube has updated, and none of the new ids are put into the pastebin yet, and thus, adblock fails.
Ah, yeah, that's more accurate. I've equated the two so far, but I expect the rate of change by both sides is still ramping up.
"Do not add filters from untrusted sources." Interesting addition.
I have been hit a lot by the adblock-block and my default browser for youtube was Chrome with uBlock. There was some back and forth and it still worked around 50% of the time. I took the oportunity to try the youtube experience on a brand new clean browser, not logged in. My seed recommendations were 80% right wing and conspiracy material. I humored the algorithm a bit and after three days I was basically in a right wing/anti science/flat and hollow earth bubble. An interesting experience to say the least. It is basically the opposite of my real world interests. I'd describe myself as libertarian and love to learn about different cultures and I do work in academia.
I have since cut my youtube viewing by about 50-80% and am not using Chrome anymore (except for testing/security). Great success Google and thanks for all the idiotic brainwashing content.
I do get that youtube needs to make money somehow and adds are the way. Unfortunately the experienc is so bad, perormance is suffering etc. that I'd rather have no youtube than youtube with adds.
I find YT is only useable via the following combination of extensions these days
- Ublock (still works for me, maybe it's a Firefox thing) - News feed eradictor (hides reccomended vids) - Pocket tube (how subscription management should have been) - Sponsorblock (auto skip sponsors which are typically gambling or predatory games)
the new adblock detection stuff is apparently being A/B tested, some see it, some dont. I run firefox + ublock + sponsorblock and the entire videoplayer is replaced by a "adblockers break ToS" thing and i cant use youtube at all.
If you're having a bad experience, that is pretty much your own fault. Make a new account or refresh the history on your old account and then spend 10 minutes subscribing to quality channels and you will not have any low-quality recommendations from YouTube.
I have almost 1500 rows in the "My filters list" (comments and blank lines included)
I couldn't think of how horrible the web browsing experience would be without uBlock Origin
never had an issue with YouTube. At least until now they only try to block blockers if you are signed in. And there really is no reason to login to watch videos.
Google's Chrome browser now aggressively thwarts uBlock on YouTube.com.
Since Firefox is not owned by Google, uBlock still works.
Isn't this just asking for an antitrust case? There is no way I implement this for my own site.
There's already an ongoing antitrust case against Google, so they could be banking on the fact that if it fails there likely won't be enough political capital to go after them again.
Implement what? Anti-ad-blocking?
> Google's Chrome browser now aggressively thwarts uBlock on YouTube.com.
If the browser just does block ad-blocking on YouTube. If I would be hosting a video platform, can I add my site to the list?
How is UBO on Google Chrome different than Brave browser?
Context - I've used UBO on Google Chrome in the past and now using Brave browser for the last few years. I don't see much difference how web feels with UBO and Brave.
uBlock blocks ads while Brave deliberately shows you ads and gives you monopoly tokens.
I think that's opt in now:
> But if you choose to see Brave Ads, you can earn.
Brave browser isn't necessarily blocking advertisements as much as it is blocking scripts that are naughty, and those naughty scripts are very popular in ads and ad networks.
And the Basic Attention Token concept is something I hope takes off since the current state of online advertising is pretty abysmal.
Brave ad blocker is not as good as UBO. You need to install UBO if you use brave.
I switched to Brave from Chromium + UBO. Despite seeing some ads, it's still comfier to use vanilla Brave than Chromium + UBO.
The one killer feature I hope for is feature parity with uMatrix. If advanced mode had the ability to filter based on type (CSS, XHR, script, cookie, image, media, other) it would be a glorious day!
uMatrix has completely changed how I use and experience the web, and going away from it (even to uBO) is such a big downgrade that I don't know what I'll do on the day it stops working D-:
I run Firefox+uBlock origin on multiple computers and OSs and haven't been affected. I'm always logged into YT.
If it's true that YT is actively trying to avoid ad blockers then I guess I may have been pushed down their priority list because I occasionally run a video or two while logged in on my phone via official app where ads actually run.
I wish for a law where it would make illegal to show/put ads on any product without the consent of the consumer/user.
The same should be applied to that cookie non-sense. Default: no cookies and website should ask for permission to enable them. Or make it an option in the browser setting to reject all cookies.
I currently use fadblock for youtube, which seems more resiliant against googles changes: https://github.com/0x48piraj/fadblock
Haha