I got a question in my head just now.
DNS sinkhole doesnt help with youtube ads but UBO does. DNS doesn’t help with twitch ads and neither UBO does. Why is that youtube doesn’t do the same what twitch does?
On a side note, my ads on twitch are basically “ad is in progress” screen and not an actual ad. And lately YT has couple of seconds with no video in the beginning as if it loads (1Gbit connection) but eventually loads up and plays with no interruptions after.
I mean, Firefox + uBlock Origin + SponsorBlock makes YouTube usable without giving Google more money
To my knowledge, sponsors do not give money to Google, just to the creator. So SponsorBlock isn’t needed.
But I have to admit that some sponsored segments can be obnoxious as hell, so I can understand why one would use it.When I’m using sponsorblock, I sometimes just stop watching if I see a long sponsor section, regardless. If the poster has like 20% of their video used to talk about shilling something, then they’re probably not someone I trust.
Ah, yes, you’re right. If the focus is just on not giving money to Google then SponsorBlock is unnecessary.
However, I also find most sponsored segments obnoxious as hell so SponsorBlock still helps with making the YouTube experience better in general
“I’ve found a workaround”
Workaround (according to article): “First of all, YouTube Premium”
The actual workaround (according to article): “Two words: uBlock Origin. Yes, I know that Google has blocked it from its Chrome Extension store, but there is still a way to get uBlock Origin on Chrome”
Seems like they are being paid by Google. Actual workaround should be to drop Chrome.
My thoughts exactly, what a heap of crap. Tom’s Guide used to be one of the good ones out there, real shame.
What I was wondering though is if they detect browser plugins through some public ID - how difficult is it to change those? In Firefox it’s absolutely trivial, you can simply download the extension, open it as a zip file, and then edit the files inside with a text editor and change the ID.
Haven’t used chrome for years, but extensions used to be javascript files just as well, so I doubt they are that hard to edit. Unless they found a way to block installations from local files and enforce their shop, no idea if that’s a thing.
if they detect browser plugins through some public ID - how difficult is it to change those?
I actually dismissed that one from the get go since there is not confirmation of any mechanism they described in the article. Not going to spend time on technical-looking explanations from someone who calls a whole another extension a “workaround”. Might as well be the case of broken or outdated filters in ABP.
I’m sure if some major site finds a way to know your extensions we’ll see some major unsolvable issues.
Imagine using Adblock/Adblock plus in 2025.
Article wasted my time. I want it back moe90.
People still use Ad Block Plus? Didn’t it start allowing sponsored ads like 10 or 15 years ago?
Hence the part “nobody noticed” in the headline
Oh thank god: its only on Chrome
lol chrome
Stop using Adblock Plus and start using Firefox with uBlock Origin.
If you’re on iOS, swallow your pride and install Brave and just turn off the crypto features. You’ll thank me later.
Fyi uBlock Origin Lite was recently released on iOS
Stop using youtube and start using peertube. WE DONT FUCKING NEED GOOGLE!
WE DONT FUCKING NEED GOOGLE!
Unless you make extremely popular video with hundred thousands views in the first day, in which case, yeah, good luck with peertube.
That does not apply to most people. Also, peertube is really getting better recently.
Yes even meta noticed that the qualityof videos on peertube is increased, they’re illegally scraping all the content for training their closed source for-profit ai video generator
Illegally? Is training that actually illegal under any current laws?
I mean the content is hosted under a license that doesn’t allow commercial exploitation without permission.
But this doesn’t stop meta because copyright laws don’t apply to them, see the over 2000 porn movies that they torrented
Many iOS workarounds. I’m using Vinegar extension and also the newly released uBlock Origin for iOS. Chefs kiss
Where do you get ublock for ios? Its not mentioned on github or on the site
So my parents use chrome even though I constantly install Firefox and hide chrome. Problem there is they end up with Edge so I stopped doing that. (Didn’t windows get in trouble for this kind of market control in the 90’s?)
So I had Ublock origin on chrome for them but it’s “not supported” anymore and my usual method of ignoring what it says and turning it back on are now failing.
Any help?
You can disable Edge if you don’t want people launching it… “accidentally.” There are a myriad of ways. Most recently I’ve used Edge Blocker, which does what it says on the label. Note that this will cause the opening of any file types associated with Edge by default to silently fail if you don’t reassign them to some other program.
The install Firefox and uBlock origin. Unless your parents deliberately go out of their way to download and install Chrome (and depending how heavy-handed you want to get you could even prevent this by busting them down to a limited user account) they won’t have any choice but to use the correct browser installed on their system. That is to say, the only one.
Oh my. THANK YOU for that edgeblocker! Going to get that on every computer in my home.
Yeah I’m not “the boss” of my parents. My dad was very tech savvy, but he doesn’t have the same memory and cognition as he used to so when I set it up nice he likes it, but any friction sets him off to “solve” the problem… By doing some random totally different thing that doesn’t so much solve the problem as “gets it working, sort of” with a browser he recognizes. Then because there are ads he loses interest and just puts on the 24/7 news cycle. :(
On the off chance that you have not heard that Linux is way more user friendly now, I recommend switching over. Especially if you are able to update the computer frequently.
Thank you. I have heard that, and I’m interested in switch my home computer and “Netflix and YouTube on the tv” computer over.
Any recommendations on where to start with that?
I used Linux as a 11 year old back in… Late 90’s? And it was not user friendly but I was so cool it didn’t matter…
Until I couldn’t get a game other than Quake 2 running on my lan network.
Haven’t checked on it since but I’m overdue and ready.
You were a good 10 years ahead of me. I was using AOL and Netscape on a 386 Pentium back then. I started on Ubuntu, but I dislike Canonical who makes it. Therefore, I would try Linux Mint. It is a Debian distribution. It is good out of box. At this point I would give it to a grandma. If you want to be cool again, there is still Arch and stuff like that, but I have that and maintaining it gets old sometimes because custom built things break more during updates. Linux Mint or Fedora. I also hear good things about OpenSuse but never tried it.
I’ll give Linux Mint a go! Thanks
Beside a big whack behind the head, Ublock Origin Lite is supported on chrome. You lose some features, and it is slower to update, but should still mostly work. Unfortunately, the youtube/ublock fight move quite fast, so results won’t be as good on that front.
If they are technically inept, reduce their accounts to limited, lock down the admin account. That will prevent them from installing Chrome, and if the admin sets a shortcut on their desktop(s), they won’t be able to remove it. Disable Edge (there are multiple ways to do so), install the necessary extensions on FF, then change FF’s desktop icon and text to “Chrome”.
Problem solved.
change FF desktop icon and text to “Chrome”
The new incognito mode?
Change default browser to Firefox
Change file type associations
Setup a firewall and black access to websites where they’re able to download other browsers. Then change the icon for Firefox to Chrome’s icon. For bonus points, you can probably find a firefox theme to make it look more like chrome.
Or if they just really don’t like Firefox for some reason they could look into trying Cromite. It has worked pretty well for me and actually does better at blocking ads on sites like https://adblock-test.pages.dev/ than Firefox with uBlock origin does.
I added a user script to clear some of the URL trackers just in case I copy links anywhere as it like opera doesn’t use extensions up front.
But on sites like that Firefox w/uBlock with score a 90 for me unless my Pihole is running, and Cromite will score 100 without it. Opera a 75, but I do like Operas interface on Android a lot.
I noticed yesterday and it’s also affecting other sites where Google serves ads, like Reddit.
I don’t use Chrome so whatever they did is affecting Adblock elsewhere too.
Everyone else has switched to Ublock Origin adblocker years ago :) Try it, it’s the only real one
10+years ago since they annouced the whitelisting of adlbock plus around that time.it was around the same time youtube to started drastically increasing thier advertisements.
It’s not on iOS or I would. I use uBlock on my PC.
Is the fact it’s impossible for me to play any thing in (PipePipe|Outertune) these past few days connected to this ?
The workaround: Switch from Adblock Plus to uBlock Origin.
ABP has had random issues that break it often for years now. It’s crap.
No uBlock on my phone. :(
On Firefox on Android you can use extensions. I’ve been using uBO for years on my phone.
As much as I hate to say it, if on iOS use Brave. You can disable the crypto shit, but it’s got the best adblocking on iOS, and paywall bypass built in.
Never. I hate Brave more than the few ads that get through on iOS with AdGuard or the recently released uBlock Origin Lite.
Why?
It’s Chromium based, has a history of doing sketchy things, and spite.
Spite has been a powerful driver in my most recent software choices recently. I know how it is.
Firefox on Android has it.
But if you’re on iOS you’d better speak to Tim Apple about it, assuming he’s finished noshing off Trump.
You can have it on iOS as well. Use Orion browser instead of safari and install UBO from the firefox addons store ;)
It doesn’t work properly… Orion still really falls short. I use Brave on iOS just because of Adblock and paywall bypass.
Oh, well I haven’t had problems so far with Orion+UBO!
ABP has also been owned and run by a shady investment firm for the past decade.
The workaround
Quit using YouTube directly and proxy your request through an Invidious instance.
Your requests are mixed in with everyone else’s, ad’s are blocked and most importantly only 1 machine touches YouTube directly and that’s the server hosting Invidious.
Not a solution for most people, unfortunately…
Could you elaborate on why not?
Most people don’t even know what Invidious is, let alone the fact that there are other video hosting sites that aren’t youtube (Vimeo, for one).
Invidious is always breaking, too, and most people will stop using it when that happens.
We are talking about most people, not the absolutely tiny minority of technical users who are aware that such a thing as Invidious even exists.
I wonder what percentage of views are done with a general purpose web browser vs. YouTube apps on phones and TVs. Otherwise, yeah, if you have a web browser it is an option. And since this thread is about browser extensions, I too am wondering what they meant.
You see how often growing youtubers complain about more than 85% of their viewers are not subscribed to the channel, or how just some videos have more views than their main content? The issue is that Invidious doesn’t have the algorithm Youtube provides to everyone, and that not a lot of people really watch their subscribed page.
more than 85% of their viewers are not subscribed
Why would you have an account in that hellhole?
Some of us made Gmail accounts long before Youtube even existed, and still rely on youtube for tutorials and other things of that nature that aren’t found anywhere else.
Don’t be a pretentious dick about it.
I was just thinking that I should host a “how to” peertube instance.
You see how often growing youtubers complain about more than 85% of their viewers are not subscribed to the channel, or how just some videos have more views than their main content?
I actually don’t watch a whole lot of YouTube anymore so I can’t really comment on this here.
The issue is that Invidious doesn’t have the algorithm Youtube provides to everyone,
But isn’t this what people are trying to avoid when it comes to digital privacy? User data being used in less algorithms?
But isn’t this what people are trying to avoid when it comes to digital privacy? User data being used in less algorithms?
Yes. Invidious and other programs, websites and anything else are useful for these kind of things. When you go to another house and in another computer you want to see some video but not affect the watch history of the user that uses the computer mainly. Or just simply watching some video that you wouldn’t normally watch.
But most people who use YouTube actively on their main computer binge-watch. Sometimes they follow creators, sometimes they follow what the algorithm recommends them for the day. Invidious does not have such algorithm, since its a proxy. So, it is really not for everyone.
Wasn’t adblock plus bought by some ad agency? I thought they were long gone…
I don’t know about that but they do have a program where advertisers can pay them in exchange for their ads being allowed past the block.
FreeTube with an ipv6 rotator and Invidious will make sure you never have to deal with this.
You can also use Freetube with tor/socks5 proxy, and every time you open Freetube, you automatically get a new IP.
This is true, but I try not to put such a heavy load on the TOR network personally. Its always good to have folks using it for clearweb stuff like this though, keeps the network legitimate.
Please elaborate…
FreeTube is a FOSS youtube frontend.
FreeTube occasionally has issues on videos with preroll ads where the video fails to play because the ad won’t be fetched. This can sometimes be mitigated by running an ipv6 rotator script and blocking freetubes access to ipv4. The one I run reassigns my ipv6 address once every 5 peels to a new randomly generated valid address.
Sometimes even this doesn’t block the ads (again causing the video to fail to play) in which case selecting the share icon from the freetube interface and clicking “open invidious link” will open a web browser pointed to whichever invidious instance is set to your default.
The freetube folks are working on implementing DASH, which should eliminate the need for these workarounds once successful.
Why not just use the invidious instance directly?
I like freetube ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Fair enough! I do wish that invidious had the “full window” option.
I too am intererted in your rotator script
Where can I get such a rotator script?
Thank you!!
Damn sure was clickbaity.
I stopped using ABP years ago and switched to uBlock Origin. That and some *Monkey scripts.
