Hacker News Reader

Comment by auslegung | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been using Brave to watch YouTube videos in incognito mode ever since 1Blocker on Safari stopped blocking YouTube ads. This article brings up some good points, and I want to support Firefox more anyway, so I need to see how Firefox handles YouTube ads.

View on HN

For the past month or so, Brave on Ubuntu has been failing to block YT ads, so now I've been stuck with 2 unskippable multi-minute ads before almost every vid. I've been hitting mute and switching tabs while I wait. The most egregiously annoying one was 6 minutes of ads on an 8-minute standup comedy clip.

Brave on mobile still blocks all that crap so I've transitioned to listening to YT content on my cellphone, propped up on my desk, while I browse the Internet on my desktop.

Same here. Made me switch back to Firefox full-time instead of trusting Brave of getting things right when they time and time stumble on things.

Why not use one of the many chrome extensions that blocks YouTube ads?

You could pay for ad-free YouTube, if you dislike the ads so much.

Many argue that "They'll pay to have ads removed", but that doesn't seem to hold true when services offers that exact option.

> Many seem to argue that "They'll pay to have ads removed", but that doesn't seem to hold true when services offers that exact option.

I would pay for ad free Youtube, if it was an option. Even with Youtube Premium, included promotions continue to be shown

Well yeah, they don't stop someone advertising a product in the main content. If they did, then James Bond movies would be a lot shorter.

The ad-blockers also don’t block those, so I don’t think that was the point.

That’s interesting, maybe that’s market/country dependent. I pay for Premium and haven’t seen and ad or promotion since I signed up.

That really not okay when you actually pay to have no ads.

You should try to install uBlock Origin. I've tried both Vivaldi's and Brave's adblockers but they're still ways behind what uBlock can do.

Have you double checked that the shields are still up for YouTube? I had the same thing happen to me a couple of weeks ago. Turned out my shields were down for YouTube for some reason.

What’s a YouTube Ad? :-) long time Firefox + uBlock Origin user here.

uBlock Origin + Sponsorblock + Firefox will give you the best possible Youtube experience.

firefox itself doesn't 'handle' youtube ads, but ublock origin does.

I use ublock origin on Firefox and it seems to properly block all YouTube ads. As with YouTube-dl it’s probably a bit of an arms race, so if your tool of choice stops working maybe wait for the next update and they’re likely to get it fixed / right.

I guess the number of users must be low. Otherwise, there's a near perfect solution for YouTube: create a stream that contains both the ads and the content and don't allow buffering ahead of time while the ads play. Sure, that's fair task, but doable. When the costs of uBlock exceeds the server+man power needed to implement that, they'll switch.

I get the impression that YouTube do not really put any effort into breaking youtube-dl, YouTube Vanced, etc. It seems that mostly when these break it's accidental.

The last thing YouTube wants to do alienate the technically literate minority who use adblocking, because these are the people who could establish an actual competitor. These folks still put money into the creator ecosystem anyway, through patreon and direct sponsorships, which funds creators to make more content. YT wins either way, honestly.

uBlock Origin with Firefox seems to work really well for blocking video ads. For me it doesn't just block YouTube ads, it manages to block adverts from a couple other streaming sites I use too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com