I use Firefox and the uBlock Origin addon as my default browser setup. It works great..except for on youtube. I used to use it happily for youtube with all Ads blocked, but two recent youtube changes made me have to use a different browser and extension, just for youtube.
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Firefox users started noticing degraded performance on youtube vs when they viewed youtube with Chrome.
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uBlock Origin users in Chrome and Firefox appear to be being targeted
with an intermittent covert punishment of having any videos above 360p throttled so that they buffer heavily.
So my current approach, just for youtube, is Chrome with Clear Skies ad skipper extension which gets me good performance and no ads.
What is your setup for youtube without ads?
I'm also interested in youtube alternatives, especially for music.
I switched to Arch Linux as my operating system a few years ago, and here I use the FreeTube app from the AUR. It's a third party frontend for YouTube, similar to Nitter for Twitter (X).
And for work (Windows) I watch YouTube via Invidious instances, e.g. https://yewtu.be also a third party frontend for YouTube
if I remember correctly, it scrapes the Youtube page directly by default, unless you explicitly enable Invidious proxy. only then it would be comparable to a third party front-end (since that's when it actually uses one).