Is Google deliberately slowing down YouTube video buffering for adblock users?
Reports suggest that Google may have implemented yet another anti-adblocking technique on YouTube. After slowing down the loading of YouTube for people with adblockers and showing ad blockers are not allowed by YouTube popups, it appears that it may now also slow down the buffering of videos on the site.
Update: the issue appears to be caused by content blockers, in particular Adblock Plus 3.22 and AdBlock 5.17. Disabling these should resolve the issue. End
Users report that the video buffer is filling slower than usual and that this may lead to video playback stopping on YouTube. In other words, the video pauses because the buffer has to load more content to continue playing.
This happens on fast connections. Users who turned off their ad blocker to play the video reported that the buffering would return to normal.
Google has not commented on this yet. The previous implementations affected only some users on YouTube and not the entire userbase that uses ad blockers.
To find out if you are affected, try playing a video on YouTube and watch the buffer. If buffering appears slow, or to slow down, then you may be affected. For affected users, video playback will catch up to the buffer eventually, which results in playback stopping.
Turning off the content blocker and playing the video is one way of finding out if Google is slowing down the video buffer deliberately.
Even YouTube Premium subscribers appear affected by this, if they use an ad blocker. Turning off the ad blocker on YouTube should resolve this as well.
What you can do about it
Apart from buying YouTube Premium or leaving YouTube for good, there are some things that affected users may do.
First thing is that it is important that only one ad blocker is enabled in the browser. Multiple ad blockers may conflict with each other.
Switching to another browser or using private browsing mode may work, at least temporarily. Google seems to test the functionality at the time, which means that other configurations may not be picked for the test.
Other than that, you may also try a new breed of ad skippers instead. Extensions such as Ad Accelerator or Ad Speedup try to skip ads or fast forward them instead if that is not possible. It is technically not blocking and apparently not detected as content blocking.
Another option is to use YouTube frontends. These ad-free privacy-friendly services, for instance Invidious, or apps like NewPipe or Skytube, give you access to YouTube's entire database of videos.
Now You: do you use YouTube?
ublock origin + yt-dlp = this is the way.
download as many videos from YouTube as you can before they tighten themselves any further!
youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false)
youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0)
youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, [])
youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)
youtube.com##+js(nano-stb, resolve(1), *, 0.001)
Whilst we are on the case of Youtube I just want to remind people to be mindful of youtube’s link tracking when you share links such as &pp= and si= strings.
These should be able to be filtered out with uBo but there are also scripts that can handle it such as “Remove YouTube Tracking Parameters and Convert Share Links” which is probably the better one right now.
I download everything using yt-dlp and Media Downloader. In some cases, I use Yt5s.com or ClipConverter.cc.
If Youtube doesn’t want us watching its videos while blocking ads, then don’t watch them on Youtube at all – watch them on your local video player.
Who still uses that subpar Adblock extension? uBlock is always the way for any browser. Never encountered any warnings or slowdowns on YouTube.
“subpar Adblock” for custom element blocking that is remembered, abp is way more intuitive than ublock, so there’s that. I’ve used both concurrently for the past 5 or so years, no problems. Ublock for automatic stuff, abp for manual stuff that I want remembered, ublock zap for manual stuff that I don’t want remembered.
You really shouldn’t run 2 at the same time, ONLY 1.
No issues (and no ads) with YT here.
Firefox ESR in permanent private browsing mode, uBlockOrigin with many, many filterlists, NoScript allowing just youtube.com to run scripts on its site, and Enhancer for YouTube with “Block Ads” checked. Also using a VPN with DNS-level filters.
Can’t tell you for sure which of the above is doing the job, but I’ve never had a problem with YouTube.
I’ve played with Invidious and Piped but have found them to be too unreliable for me, and given my set-up above, I don’t think they would add much in the way of privacy. But I applaud their efforts.
Still not enough, speed should be zero. :D
Another option is to quit YT and stop giving them your eyeballs and brain.
Nice in theory but a good chunk of the “free” content I watch is hosted on YT.
I’ll take buffering over ads any day.
Yes. Yes it is.
I agree with this “Yes”.
I use Invidious all the time, but more often than not the video either won’t play at all, or stutters all the time even when switching to another instance.
What needs to happen is that users stop uploading content until Google agrees to curtail their policy of injecting ads to the content.
Invidious instances indeed happen to fail, some work better than others.
In my experience, he best two I know are :
1- [https://invidious.fdn.fr/]
2- [https://yewtu.be/] : this one in particular has always been a leader.
Users may refer to an Invidious front-end by itself which updates the working Invidious instances (as well as many other front-ends) :
1- [https://farside.link/] which avoids Cloudflare instances
2- [https://cf.farside.link/] which includes Cloudflare instances.
I happen to use Invidious, but I prefer :
1- ‘Piped’ [https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped], Piped instances [https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped/wiki/Instances]
2- ‘Piped-Material’ ‘https://github.com/mmjee/Piped-Material]
‘Piped’ instances up to now don’t handle live streaming with the exception of two instances :
1- [https://piped.privacydev.net/]
2- [https://piped.seitan-ayoub.lol/]
‘Piped-material’ instances have recently been updated and no longer handle live streaming (as with ‘Piped’ instances above mentioned) so IMO has no longer advantages compared to ‘Piped’ instances. Moreover ‘Piped-Material’ has never handled correctly embedded YouTube videos (it fails when user’s cookies behavior is set to ‘block 3-rd party’).
Finally, be it ‘Piped’ as well as ‘Piped-Material’, they all included in their ‘Preferences’ page the Piped api to choose, default is theirs, and theirs is not always the most appropriate. In my experience the best are :
1- [adminforge.de]
2- [smnz.de]
Side-note, Germany is obviously leader of the band when it comes to the number of front-ends and ore importantly their quality. I don’t understand why France (my country) seems so poorly committed to such front-ends, and not only when it comes to front-ends but to user privacy in general …
That’s about it. Maybe slightly complex, but not complicated. For automatizing the process of bypassing YouTube servers via front-ends dedicated redirection extensions do the work, and IMO the best is :
1- ‘Redirector’ [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/] : the best.
2- ‘URLRedirector’ [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/urlredirector/] : less advanced.
That’s about it, in my everlasting experience to avoid accessing YouTube directly.
@Tom Hawack, thanks for the comprehensive and very helpful opinion.
Can I ask Redirector to export your personal settings and make them available for me to use?
Thank you so much…………..
@sal,
I’ve chosen the Redirector rules I use For redirecting YouTube to Piped.
The zip file contains :
1- Redirector.json : my exported rules you’ll have to import from the Redirector extension
2- Redirector-README.txt : information
The zip file was uploaded at [15/01/2024 09:55 GMT] and expires after 6 days :
[https://filebin.net/5h5gtjfhijd2lb0g]
Hope that helps.
@Tom Hawack, thank you very much. They also work in the Chromium browser. :}
@sal, nice to hear the redirection rules work in your environment and nice to know in a Chromium browser as well.
I forgot to emphasize in the ‘Redirector-README.txt’ file that it is *really* advised IMO to set the preferences in the chosen Piped instance(s) you use, and mainly the piped api because some instances may not display a video correctly only because they use natively a piped api which is not the best. The piped api that I’ve experienced as the best on the long term are as mentioned above :
1- [adminforge.de]
2- [smnz.de]
Anyway, feels nice to have a clean, ad-free, quick display of a YouTube video/channel, playlist, doesn’t it?!
@Tom Hawack, thanks for the comprehensive and very helpful opinion.
Can I ask Redirector to export your personal settings and make them available for me to use?
Thank you so much…………
@Tom Hawack, thanks for the comprehensive and very helpful opinion.
Can I ask Redirector to export your personal settings and make them available for me to use?
Thank you so much…
@Tom Hawack, thanks for the comprehensive and very helpful opinion.
Can I ask Redirector to export your personal settings and make them available for me to use?
Thank you so much.
The developer of uBlock Origin says:
“Those performance issues affect only the latest version of both Adblock Plus (3.22) & AdBlock (5.17), and afflict more than just Youtube.
uBO is *not* affected.”
https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1746263759495077919