New Youtube anti-adblock tactic- being a resource hog- debunked, was Adblock issue

Tsumi

Tsumi

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Mar 18, 2010
Messages
13,760
https://www.pcgamer.com/its-not-jus...-as-part-of-its-draconian-war-on-ad-blockers/

Looks like Youtube is making Chrome run slower by artificially increasing CPU usage when it detects adblock. The kicker is this affects Youtube premium members as well. Really makes me question the value of Youtube premium when they do scorched earth tactics like this.

Personally haven't noticed any slowdowns on my primary rig with Firefox, adblock and ublock extensions installed. My mom was complaining about Youtube being slower than normal on her laptop with Chrome + adblock.

Edit: CPU usage appears to be lower on Firefox with Adblock and Ublock enabled :D

Second edit: https://www.neowin.net/news/adblock...d-lag-youtube-performance-with-ad-blocker-on/- looks like this was a problem specific to Adblock and Adblock Plus and not others like Ublock and Adblocker Ultimate (which is what I was using in Firefox).
 
Last edited:
268902cd8c9508fb832ddd4377c3a754--fire-art-addons.jpg
 
Tsumi said:
https://www.pcgamer.com/its-not-jus...-as-part-of-its-draconian-war-on-ad-blockers/

Looks like Youtube is making Chrome run slower by artificially increasing CPU usage when it detects adblock.
Click to expand...
People also noticed this with FireFox a month ago.

View: https://youtu.be/_x7NSw0Irc0?si=2vRHhPR_luQUGEt1
The kicker is this affects Youtube premium members as well. Really makes me question the value of Youtube premium when they do scorched earth tactics like this.
Click to expand...
This shouldn't be what makes you question YouTube Premium's value. Addon's like Ublock which blocks the ads for free, Sponsorskip which skips the ads that YouTube Premium doesn't skip, and this down vote addon which brings back the ability to see down votes on YouTube which again YouTube Premium doesn't do. You can do these on Android as well, or just download Revanced and get all these plus intro skip. The only value you get from YouTube Premium is from devices like iPhones, Roku's, and other smartTV's that won't allow you to install these. Just another reminder why you shouldn't use these devices in place of a proper NUC.
Personally haven't noticed any slowdowns on my primary rig with Firefox, adblock and ublock extensions installed. My mom was complaining about Youtube being slower than normal on her laptop with Chrome + adblock.
Click to expand...
I haven't noticed this myself but I'm on Linux and Firefox so maybe I'm immune?
Edit: CPU usage appears to be lower on Firefox with Adblock and Ublock enabled :D
Click to expand...
I don't know if running two adblockers is such a good idea. Ublock is all you should really need.
 
DukenukemX said:
People also noticed this with FireFox a month ago.

View: https://youtu.be/_x7NSw0Irc0?si=2vRHhPR_luQUGEt1

This shouldn't be what makes you question YouTube Premium's value. Addon's like Ublock which blocks the ads for free, Sponsorskip which skips the ads that YouTube Premium doesn't skip, and this down vote addon which brings back the ability to see down votes on YouTube which again YouTube Premium doesn't do. You can do these on Android as well, or just download Revanced and get all these plus intro skip. The only value you get from YouTube Premium is from devices like iPhones, Roku's, and other smartTV's that won't allow you to install these. Just another reminder why you shouldn't use these devices in place of a proper NUC.

I haven't noticed this myself but I'm on Linux and Firefox so maybe I'm immune?

I don't know if running two adblockers is such a good idea. Ublock is all you should really need.
Click to expand...

Haven't really noticed, then again I'm generally multitasking when on Youtube so small delays are easy to miss. I would also generally chalk up slow performance to my craptastic Xfinity service.

Thanks for the links, I should get Revanced for my phone.

Haven't had any problems running Adblock and Ublock together. I started on Adblock and added Ublock when certain things got through so it's become a habit to just have both.
 
Have never received alleged "you're running an adblocker" notice or noticed any slowdowns on any devices here, windows, mac, nix.
Also use brave on iOS (works great btw) and revanced on android. They can DIAF as far as I'm concerned, especially shorts.

Don't use chrome except where needed, Firefox forever with ublock origin.
 
I actually noticed it , was watching some video and the whole browser window felt slow to a crawl . thought maybe a memory leak so i just restart , did help
real sad tactic youtube, real sad
 
Tsumi said:
https://www.pcgamer.com/its-not-jus...-as-part-of-its-draconian-war-on-ad-blockers/

Looks like Youtube is making Chrome run slower by artificially increasing CPU usage when it detects adblock. The kicker is this affects Youtube premium members as well. Really makes me question the value of Youtube premium when they do scorched earth tactics like this.

Personally haven't noticed any slowdowns on my primary rig with Firefox, adblock and ublock extensions installed. My mom was complaining about Youtube being slower than normal on her laptop with Chrome + adblock.

Edit: CPU usage appears to be lower on Firefox with Adblock and Ublock enabled :D
Click to expand...
All this will do is drive more people away from their platforms. I bet there are tons of people that haven’t used another browser other than Chrome for years.

More people will try other browsers as a result of this and perhaps find out that they don’t really need Chrome. I don’t expect this to happen widely, but every negative move like this and little by little people will leave.

Chrome doesn’t offer anything unique and is increasingly becoming anti-consumer.
 
I been noticing youtube on my work laptop became dog shit slow the past couple weeks. It is a 5 year old laptop with only 8gb ram so yea youtube on Chrome been bring it to its knees. Firefox is better but still pretty laggy.
 
Haven't noticed any slowdowns. *shrug*

Might just be how YT UI is nowadays. It loads a bunch of videos on the page. I ran a test where I opened YT and saw about 20mbps of bandwidth usage for a few seconds. Its probably pre-caching videos for quick previewing and that might cause the apparent slowness.
 
As someone who regularly uses a decade-old dual core laptop, I have definitely noticed youtube getting more bloated in the past year.

Not sure if the slowdowns are due to ad-block-blocking or not. Regardless, I have had to switch to the minitube application for a non-manure experience.
 
Most yt ads seem to vanish after refreshing the page, lately. Dunno if it's related to my browser (kiwi) or something else. Had to resort to that since the skip button no longer appears.
 
I've encountered said slowdown a couple of days ago. At first I was wondering if there was something wrong with my system or there was a Windows update hogging CPU time, but nope. A reboot and an Adblock Plus update later and I was off to the races again. Using Firefox for the record.

The cryptobro (Neal Mohan, was it?) running YouTube is doing a fine job of turning the platform into a dumpster fire. He's responsible for everything you've hated about YouTube the last few years.
 
So to test this go to Youtube and play a video then switch it to fullscreen then back to windowed and you'll see lag. This just started happening recently. As someone already mentioned I don't see the lag problem with Firefox.
 
I kind of like edge on chromium. It lets you install chrome extensions anyways, but without this nonsense
 
StryderxX said:
So to test this go to Youtube and play a video then switch it to fullscreen then back to windowed and you'll see lag. This just started happening recently. As someone already mentioned I don't see the lag problem with Firefox.
Click to expand...
i have been experiencing this issue all weekend , i thought it was the trial version of malwarebytes that was causing all this, guess i was was wrong , runs fine ib firefox so fuck chrome i guess.
youtube was all ateup with ads lately and i could never really find a real work around for it in chrome.
 
Sooooo... they made Chrome run slower so that people would just switch to another browser instead?

Is this where I'm supposed to be clapping?

DukenukemX said:
I haven't noticed this myself but I'm on Linux and Firefox so maybe I'm immune?
Click to expand...

I doubt it. Certain web pages can indeed destroy Firefox (or probably any browser really). One of the best stress tests I've found for my 7800X3D's cooling recently is to just open up a lot of tabs on civitai, and notice that some of them are randomly taking up 100% of a core, which somehow raises temperatures on my CPU die more than ANY stress test I have ever tried on this machine, Cinebench R24 included. I'm pretty sure that web site makes my fans whir up on my 11400F/3080 Ti system that I actually (dedicated) run Stable Diffusion on, too (which is using Nobara Linux btw). The difference is that it's completely random on CivitAI, which means they probably (probably) aren't doing this intentionally. Google? Yeah they can totally do this intentionally. It's trivial to fuck up a web site's javascript/css/etc enough to make it absolutely destroy your CPU. Thanks, web standards.

That said, last few times I've opened youtube, I haven't noticed much happening in Firefox. While watching an LMG video (backend of Linus' main channel) just now, it's only using 3% CPU. So, not sure.
 
Tsumi said:
Haven't really noticed, then again I'm generally multitasking when on Youtube so small delays are easy to miss. I would also generally chalk up slow performance to my craptastic Xfinity service.
Click to expand...
I haven't seen any issue with YouTube until I play a game like Star War Jedi Fallen, and that's because I have hundreds of tabs open. Otherwise, everything is instant. Also again, I'm on Linux. Louis Rossmann is talking about this issue again.

View: https://youtu.be/SkRlfB_iz3E?si=nuN8ne0sSbG8ekou
Haven't had any problems running Adblock and Ublock together. I started on Adblock and added Ublock when certain things got through so it's become a habit to just have both.
Click to expand...
There shouldn't be an issue with running two adblockers, but it just seems unnecessary as it can eat additional resources. Also Adblock itself isn't as good a Ublock anyway. If there are any problems, there are always alternatives to YouTube like Odysee and yewtu.be.
https://odysee.com/
https://yewtu.be/feed/popular

Just to give you an idea, here's that same Louis Rossmann video on Odysee.

View: https://odysee.com/@rossmanngroup:a/ad-blockers-beware-youtube%27s-latest-move:3
Here's that same video on jewtu.be. If YouTube starts to screw around with performance and adblocking, there are alternatives.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=SkRlfB_iz3E
 
The Mad Atheist said:
Thought someone already covered this a few weeks back?
Click to expand...
I think at this point every couple weeks to few months Youtube tries some new anti-adblock measure and sees what sticks. Some sneaky, some not so sneaky.

Meanwhile, Youtube continues to do nothing to clean up the trash on their platform, from stolen AI altered videos to inappropriate Youtube Kids content.
 
I use Firefox with NoScript and have Youtube Premium. I just tested it and noticed no slow downs. Firefox is using 1% CPU during video playback. No delays or adblock prompt (some sites detect NoScript as an adblocker).
 
I've had a couple of crashes in my mini N100 pc just this week, something about clock timer and it's only when youtube is running. Using Vivaldi browser.
 
1_rick said:
Neowin has an article I can't find again claiming the latest thing, "Youtube is using lots of cpu" it's actually a bug in AdBlock.
Click to expand...
Wouldn't be the first time bandwagon news sites got things wrong in the mad scramble for clickbait.
 
1_rick said:
Neowin has an article I can't find again claiming the latest thing, "Youtube is using lots of cpu" it's actually a bug in AdBlock.
Click to expand...
I'll update the OP, found the article. According to them it was specific to an update in Adblock and Adblock Plus. Ublock and others did not suffer from the same problem.
GoldenTiger said:
I know, how dare they try to make money!! The service should be ad free by default and have no tracking!!!!!!! It should be funded by donations!!!!!
Click to expand...
I do not fault Youtube for being a for-profit company. I do fault them for focusing on short term gains at the expense of long term goodwill. This loss of goodwill is why anything that happens with Youtube will initially be viewed in a negative light rather than giving benefit of the doubt.
 
I was wondering what the big deal was as UBlock seemed fine in Firefox and Edge the entire time.

I gave up on Chrome long ago...
 
Tsumi said:
I do not fault Youtube for being a for-profit company. I do fault them for focusing on short term gains at the expense of long term goodwill. This loss of goodwill is why anything that happens with Youtube will initially be viewed in a negative light rather than giving benefit of the doubt.
Click to expand...
The problem is that as time went on the ads became more intrusive. What was originally a 15 second skippable ad is now back to back 30 second ads that can't be skipped. It's the same idea as to why people have adblocking on websites, because what was just a few ads is now dedicating the sides of the webpage just for loading a string of ads. This is one of those situations where if you get too greedy you lose everything. YouTube can go out of business for all I care, because it's not like the content they host is made by them. It's also not like other websites don't already host the same content without ads. YouTube killed animation back in the day due to the insane requirement of needing videos to be 10+ minutes long. They pay content uploaders very little in general. Most revenue comes from sources like sponsors and Patreon. It's very easy to see YouTube end up like so many other Google projects.
 
GoldenTiger said:
I know, how dare they try to make money!! The service should be ad free by default and have no tracking!!!!!!! It should be funded by donations!!!!!
Click to expand...
I'm glad you have a solid, one-dimensional view of things. It makes for interesting discussions.
 
Still have had no issue with Firefox and uBlock Origin. CPU usages floats around 1% during 4K video playback with no weird lag when switching back and forth from fullscreen.

If you're running Adblock Plus alongside UBO, then get rid of it. This is one of the first things that the UBO developer says in their sticky on Reddit when troubleshooting issues. Why one would still use ABP at all after they started pay-for-whitelist many years ago baffles me.
 
All these years I have just used NoScript and skipped both Adblock Plus and UBO. Way back in the day I used the original Adblock before I just switched to NoScript. Mostly because my main goal was to stop sites from executing whatever they wanted in my browser. Am I really missing anything by not using UBO? The only downside is that it took a while to get a list of whitelisted sites and then when doing something "official" (e.g. paying certain bills) I temporarily whitelist the browser tab.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top