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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

Also noticed that adblocking on youtube has recently (~week) gotten much less effective. Usually updating the list and restarting chrome fixes it but not anymore

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Why would you use Chrome for that in 2022?

I use Chrome for youtube (logged in) and FF for other browsing, i.e. both open

That used to be me until about 6 months ago. Now FF performs as well or better than chrome, and adblocking works like a charm. I might have had to open uBlock Origin and click a few more lists several weeks ago, (for youtube, paramount plus, and hulu) but everything's grand now.

The only thing I still need chromium for is google meet :/ (and huddles in slack)

I suggest you give it a try again!

Are there any good sites to help set up ubo well? Also my local dns filter gave up yesterday in advance of the nov 1st date. I was using personaldns. I could use a good reference on options, like loading it through f-droid or using a vpn/dns filter service, or just exposing a vpn at home to use my home pihole (and eating the latency) also dns filters don't seem to stop YouTube ads even in the browser where ubo can. Is it doing some ip level filtering?

You can use FF with multi-account containers (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...), no need to have a separate browser for a Google/Youtube login. This keeps the login to Youtube/Google tabs only, others are completely separated and know nothing about your Google account. Also works for FB and other stuff, ofc.

I do actually have that installed & in use too

...just found the additional separation mentally helpful too in switching tabs.

If the adblocking in chrome is broken (manifest3 sigh) then will have to move.

Firefox has container tabs if you don't want to leak your Google account to everything else. And it blocks ads perfectly.

Why only for YouTube? YouTube on FF with uBlock Origin still yields zero ads.

Using firefox fixes it for me.

Yeah, why does ubo work when i view YouTube in the browser but if i turn off ubo, my pihole doesn't catch it? Do I need better lists on my pihole or is ubo doing something extra?

Also, what is a good media size threshold to block? Zero seems to somehow let through things i don't want and block things I do. Really i just want to block gifs and videos. Very distracting.

Pihole only does DNS-based filtering, which only works when ads are served from a different server/URL than the hosted content. Youtube serves both from the same addresses, so DNS blocking is ineffective - in-browser filtering like uBO does it is the only way.

How does ubo distinguish it? Is it using ip addresses instead of dns, or something much more complicated?

Let's say you load https://example.com/video and that page loads https://example.com/ads.js in the background.

What DNS adblockers like PiHole see is only a request for the domain (example.com), they can't see whether it is http or https nor can they see /ads.js or the rest of the path, port, query parameters, etc. They may not even see the second attempt at loading the domain (the /ads.js request) because the browser and the OS have probably cached the request.

uBlock Origin and other adblockers can see the whole request and modify it[1]. They can see whether it is http or https (that's how https everywhere knows what to redirect and where) and they can see whether you are loading /video or /ads.js and if they see /ads.js they can tell the browser to not load that.

[1] Google is going to remove the "modify" part of functionality in manifest v3 citing privacy and security concerns (while ironically keeping the "see" part) in an attempt to kill or limit the functionality of adblockers. Since YouTube uses an ever changing list of domains for serving videos and ads this change will effectively unblock ads in YouTube because adblockers can only keep a static list of what to block and when instead of doing it dynamically, and said static list can only be updated (as far as I know) by pushing a new version of the extension to the store, severely limiting the frequency of updates, making it impossible to keep up with the frequent changes in YouTube.

Mozilla has already said firefox may retain extra features when adopting v3, is the modify capability not part of that?

How feasible is it to have my vpn gateway self cert and proxy everything and do the work there?

Yes, Mozilla is keeping the whole functionality. You can MITM yourself but then you'll be lowering your own security and your proxy will have to do its own certificate validation because the browser won't be able to do it anymore. You are also restricted to things you can modify with a simple regex (unless you add HTML parsing to your proxy but then you'll be double parsing, once in the proxy and another time in the browser). And it's still probably going to break with websites in the HSTS preload list. And content generated by JavaScript won't be blocked easily. It's also going to be very inefficient, don't underestimate the years of performance improvements behind adblocking extensions. Adblockers like uBlock Origin also do much more than just blocking requests. For example they can inject small snippets of JavaScript to neutralize tracking scripts without breaking websites that depend on them by introducing dummy functions with the same API as the tracking script or to counter anti adblocking scripts. It can also inject CSS snippets to fix website breakage. And block requests based on what website they originate from. And probably much more than you can easily do with a simple proxy.

There's a setting in uBo "Suspend network activity until all filter lists are loaded" that isn't checked by default. If you check it and restart the browser it should work. Solved it for me at least.

I’ve noticed this as well. I’ve had AdGuard on my phone for almost a year, and it blocked YouTube ads very effectively… until about 2 weeks ago. Still investigating…

iOS? Do you have "advanced protection" enabled? Since some time ago standard content blocking rules are not enough and we need a WebExtension to be allowed to run on YT to block ads there.

Oh and one more thing: there's an option to "share" video from the YT app or YT webpage to AdGuard. This is probably the only possible way to get rid of ads when you're using the YouTube app.

Just happened to me this morning. An automatic update of iOS for some reason switched off AdGuard-- I'd forgotten just how bad the ads are. Anyway, easily fixed by switching the parts back on.

Brave browser is quite effective in blocking YouTube ads (plus most other ads).

ublock origin, sponsorblock, return youtube dislike, freshview for youtube.

its like 2014-> never happened.

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