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Those YouTube ads everyone hates made $10.4 billion in just three months
(www.pcgamer.com)
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this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
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Technology
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uBlock Origin + Firefox
FreeTube + integrated SponsorBlock
It blocks normal ads, plus Sponsored segments and some other segments if you wish to. Its configurable. This addon is also available for Firefox. I do not use Firefox to watch YouTube anymore.
I hadn't heard of FreeTube, thanks for the recommendation.
It lets you have a local configuration that keep tracks of what videos you watched and allows for custom playlists. Without a Google account. I don't know if a smartphone app is available, as I only use it on my PC.
Unofficial Freetube for Android.
That helps but still stalls out etc on occasion for me, so I use freetube 90% of the time I want to see something on youtube.
I hope I'm not jinxing myself, but I don't ever mess with my Ublock Origin settings and I've never once had it break or gotten the threatening messages about adblockers on YT. I'm not sure why, but I'm not going to change anything while I've got a good thing going.
I've never gotten the warnings (yet), mainly just slow loading times or the occasional stallout.
What’s wild to me is that after making over 10b in a few months Google still has the gall to want to squash ad blocking. How much more money do they want? To what end?
Lately, Firefox + uBlock Origin and YouTube on Linux is sometimes horribly slow for me. It uses all the CPU and chokes my computers. Sometimes it's even difficult to just seek in the video, as it's so sluggish.
It seems to vary depending on the type of ads. It's not "random" because a video that has this behavior will always do it, even if I restart FF, while others will be fine.
I thought it was my old computer at first, or that I was out of memory, but the same thing happens on my modern Ryzen.
Although I notice it less and less, so maybe it was a bug with YT + uBlock.
And it's only on my Linux computers. On Android, FF + uBlock works super well.
Just a shot in the dark here, but do you have ambient mode enabled? (that annoying glow light around the video). I've read from various people that it can use an insane amount of cpu on some devices. Disabling it fixed the performance issues they faced.
On desktop I really like FreeTube, if you're interested in an alternative. I don't usually want apps for things that should be websites, but I use YouTube enough (and Google invests so much energy in making youtube.com a miserable experience) that it justifies having a dedicated app for it, in my case.
I have similar issues with YouTube in Firefox on Windows. But I think my aging laptop might just be having trouble loading the script-riddled site more than anything.