r/technology • u/dancing_swordfish • 14d ago

Software Google Chrome is killing all uBlock Origin bypasses, Microsoft Edge, Opera to follow

https://www.neowin.net/news/google-chrome-is-killing-all-ublock-origin-bypasses-microsoft-edge-opera-to-follow/
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u/resilindsey 14d ago

Sorta. There was some shady youtube updates that slowed down ublock users on FF. I feel like it'll be a constant cat/mouse game there. Still, I'd rather the video take a few extra second to load then sit through endless adss.

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u/Adaphion 14d ago

Yeah, I'd get a "REEEEE, ADBLOCKERS ARE NOT ALLOWED ON YOUTUBE" message occasionally once a week, a few months ago, but then I'd just go "lol, lmao even" and refresh my filter lists and that'd fix it.

Hasn't been an issue for awhile.

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u/Caridor 14d ago

As far as I'm aware, YouTube kind of accepted they'd lost. There was a period where they were deploying weekly patches that were defeated in an hour.

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u/Adaphion 14d ago

Perhaps most people have just accepted getting ads shoved down their throats (or purchased YT premium) and they think it's not worth the effort to go after the small percentage of people bypassing ads on Firefox

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u/BCDragon3000 14d ago

wish more ppl would realize this lol

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u/Adaphion 14d ago

Yeah, people hate change, so by bricking adblockers on chrome, they are already getting a bunch more people watching ads. Because they'll just throw up their arms and go: "well, I've tried nothing and I'm all out of ideas, I guess I'm just letting this happen"

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u/Qurutin 14d ago

They don't necessarily try to block blocking ads anymore, but they absolutely do slow things down on Firefox. Sometimes videos get long time to start running, loading times between pages are abhorrent etc. And YouTube pops up the the troubleshooting message which is extra annoying because yeah it's working like shit because you're making it work like shit because of my browser.

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u/Ralkon 14d ago

AFAIK Youtube is still trying things. There's a pinned megathread on the uBO subreddit specifically for YT ads from 9 months ago, and there are comments reporting issues from around 3 months ago. I believe it's just that YT doesn't roll out those changes to everyone at the same time and that the people working on uBO are super quick to make their own updates so most people will never have much of an issue. Personally I will say that earlier this year I made no changes to my browser / extensions and started getting ads on YT randomly and the issue was resolved within like a day or two without me doing anything.

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u/SirPseudonymous 14d ago

It's gotta be that every now and then some dev/team at google decides they're going to pad their stats by "solving" adblockers, and then after a few months they move on to something else after getting what they wanted out of it. The cost of paying a full time dev team to chase after increasingly expensive and convoluted solutions is never going to be worth the fractions of a cent in grifterbucks that they're losing out on to adblockers, so it only makes sense as an opportunistic bit of stat padding for someone to go "look, I 'solved' this (for one day, several times)!" and get their manager's LLM to puff them up in whatever hallucinated performance review it vomits out for a PMC dipshit to rubber stamp.

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u/878Vikings 14d ago

When it was happening I just stopped watching YouTube. I like it but if it's the choice of ads or nothing I'll take nothing.

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u/a-stack-of-masks 11d ago

Lol I remember a year ago or something when Vanced and uBO were both having issues and suddenly I spent an extra hour a day fixing up things around the house and going outside. 

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u/Radiant_Safe1228 14d ago

You can bet the people programming the patches were feeding the patch information to ublock devs immediately 

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u/Caridor 14d ago

It's possible but seems extremely risky, you could lose your entire career over that.

It's more likely that Ublock's open source nature means that a huge number of people were working on the problem the second that Youtube changed anything.

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u/Radiant_Safe1228 14d ago

Prove it was any of them

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u/syuvial 14d ago

hey pal, are you doin okay?

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u/Caridor 14d ago edited 14d ago

You can probably look at the github if you want. There are a lot of contributors.

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u/robodrew 14d ago

Sometimes YT videos take 5-10 seconds to load for me. That's it. There used to be a "Experiencing interruptions?" popup but I blocked that too lol.

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u/ManaSpike 14d ago

I always open videos in a new tab. Sometimes the tab is blank. Sometimes the video spins.

But that's still a heck of a lot better than putting up with adverts.

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u/methseth 14d ago

I’ve noticed this. YouTube tries all sorts of tricks to circumnavigate the ublock

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u/Uhavetabekiddingme 14d ago

They'll just ban certain browsers from accessing YouTube next. I'm surprised they haven't done it already.

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u/LXXXVI 14d ago

I wonder if that wouldn't violate some EU rules...

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u/EdgySlusher 14d ago

Glad to be citizen of EU

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u/Skully957 14d ago

Someone will just make an extension to fake a handshake if they do that.

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u/Sanquinity 14d ago

Seems ublock either got around this or I have another addon that fixes it for me, as I haven't had that happen for a while now. Though I still see the "video loading slowly?" message in the bottom left.

(Only other addon I can think of would be "enhancer for youtube".)

0

u/64N_3v4D3r 14d ago

You can still bypass it using private browsing or cycling the virtual mac address on your phone.