“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 Might as well be the case of broken or outdated filters in ABP.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.
The workaround: Switch from Adblock Plus to uBlock Origin.
ABP has had random issues that break it often for years now. It’s crap.
ABP has also been owned and run by a shady investment firm for the past decade.
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.
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.
It’s almost irrelevant to subscribe to a channel, the algorithm anyway pushes whatever it wants ignoring your requests
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.
Unless the instance owner is a network god, they blacklist the IP address almost immediately (they see thousands of videos watched at the same time from the same IP address, trivial to detect)
No uBlock on my phone. :(
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 ;)
I just tried this and I get an alert that unlock isn’t fully available. Seems it can’t access web request API.
I’ll give it a spin out of curiosity. I pay for Kagi anyway. I’m very opposed to Google.
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!
Even YouTube? The last time I tried (a couple months ago) on both mobile and desktop Orion it’s totally unusable, most of the time it just gets stuck on a black screen for 10-60 seconds where the ads should be.
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.
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.
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.
It’s not a matter of “getting better”. It’s a matter of having the bandwidth. You can’t serve a video to ten of thousands of people from one or two servers. And you can’t do it with P2P at that scale either. There’s nothing technical to do about that; it’s basically a physic limitation. To address that you’d have to publish your video in dozens or hundreds of servers beforehand, and the system have to handle load balancing and source lookup efficiently. Basically, work as a full CDN. And that’s expensive to do. The reason youtube can do that is not that they have wonderful, almost magical software running on their servers, it’s that they have a lot of them.
And, sure, it doesn’t apply to most people. Which is irrelevant; most people are not what are driving the masses. One large enough youtuber going peertube would give it more visibility than thousands of individual people. That’s the reason people are still using youtube; because people go where the content they want is.
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
You could just use plain vinegar.
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
If they are technologically inept, reduce their accounts to limited, lock down the admin account. That will prevent them from uninstalling FF/installing Chrome, and if the admin account 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?
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.
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.
Fyi uBlock Origin Lite was recently released on iOS
AdGuard and SponsorBlock work fine on Safari on iOS.
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
Tom’s Hardware, Ad Block Plus, paying for YouTube Premium as a “work around”?
Guys this content was by boomers for boomers
Indeed. Tom’s Hardware for me has for long been one of the most useless tech news sites, mostly just dumb clickbaity ad articles in disguise.
If they would know anything about anything or done some actual research they would point to Firefox with a few relevant extensions that keep YouTube’s fuckery in check. Or the alternative mobile apps. Or stuff like Invidious. But guess they are too mainstream and thus afraid to upset Google in any way.
Guys this content was by boomers for boomers
Tom’s Hardware sold out looong ago, sold in 2007 to some faceless consortium. The original “Tom”, Thomas Pabst, who is GenX and not a boomer btw, has had nothing to do with the site since.
The editor of this article looks to be a millennial btw.
To gen z, a boomer is anybody older than them
boomer is a state of mind
Imagine using Adblock/Adblock plus in 2025.
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
No, author of this article, paying for premium is not a workaround.
more like walking in
It has some real “Ukraine should just stop fighting a losing war” vibes. I wonder how much Alphabet paid them for that article. Probably not much.
The internet hasn’t noticed yet
Says article on the internet shared with others on the internet and linked to from many internet places.
Article titles are fucking garbage. At least it didn’t pul the “Here’s why” bullshit.
Damn sure was clickbaity. No ads? Buy YT Premium they say.
Whoopee. Saved you a click.
I stopped using ABP years ago and switched to uBlock Origin. That and some *Monkey scripts.
Bah, This is just an add for a YouTube premium subscription
FreeTube with an ipv6 rotator and Invidious will make sure you never have to deal with this.
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 seconds 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.
Thank you!!
I too am intererted in your rotator script
https://github.com/ycd/ipv6-rotator
Edit: not my code, for the record.
Where can I get such a rotator script?
https://github.com/ycd/ipv6-rotator
Edit: not my code, for the record.
Why not just use the invidious instance directly?
I like freetube ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Fair enough! I do wish that invidious had the “full window” option.
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.
Article wasted my time. I want it back moe90.
Who uses Adblock Plus? Isn’t uBlock Origin (Lite) the shit to go to?
ublock origin non-lite is the shit to go to
Lite was delibaretly in brackets :)
I see, but lite is much less effective. google has worked hard to make it lose its capabilities. it may still be effective at blocking youtube ads (though as it cannot use frequently updatable blocklists it probably has a higher delay for fixes when something breaks), but it cannot have specific rules for less popular sites, because of chrome’s low limit on allowed filtering rules, and even though it can hide ads, that’s not the sole function of ublock origin. ubo is a complex content blocker, with versatile tools to defuse site tracking on lots of websites. lite cannot do that anymore effectively, because both its capabilities have been reduced (e.g. it cannot edit network traffic anymore I think), and the number of filtering rules that it can load.
and even before lite, ubo could not be as effective on chrome as on firefox, because of slight differences in the extension api, with not so slight practical differences.
yeah, lite is worse, no arguing there
Luckily I use Maxthon which stll supports uBlock Oriigin non Lite. When it stopps, Firefox here we go :)
Yes, and it has been for many many years. In 2011 Adblock Plus deemed some ads acceptable, no longer blocking them categorically. Following that controversity, uBlock Origin became the popular standard.
Honestly, given that Adblock Plus has always had an “acceptable ads” system - I guess they simply decided now YouTube ads are acceptable. Not really surprising then.
I’m using Adblock Plus, because of their Acceptable Ads system. Imo it’s far more ethical to regulate ads than to ban them entirely. Websites have to make money to sustain themselves, and ads are the least intrusive way this can be done besides donations (and let’s be honest, most websites can’t support themselves on donations alone). I’d rather have an ad or two at the end of an article than a paywall.
I would love to switch to a different adblocker, ABP has quite enshittified over the years imo. But it would have to be one with Acceptable Ads support.
If you want to support a webpage, then donate to it. This ad-based business model should die.
Donating costs me money. Donating to every single website I like or rely on requires far more money than I have available or am willing to spend. I don’t know your situation, but I’m not rich. I don’t have that kind of disposable income to just throw around.
That said, thanks for mentioning that. I did donate to kbin when it was still around, but I’ve forgotten to set up donations for mbin and kbin.earth since switching over. I’ll have to get on with that.
