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Comment by kspacewalk2 | Hacker News Reader

Been watching YouTube on Firefox (Android and MacOS) with uBlock Origin with zero ads ever. What am I missing?

YouTube split tests (“A/B tests”) their changes. If you haven’t seen the modal warning you to disable your AdBlocker on YouTube, then you will soon.

Not necessarily, if you kept your filters and extension up-to-date, you won't see that pop-up either. uBlock handles it just fine. During early days of YT trying to force me to disable it, all I had to do is to open the settings, update filters and it was just fine. Thankfully it's been peaceful now for long time.

This isn't correct. A few weeks ago it started stopping me in FF with uBO running.

Ublock does all this. However in the first few weeks you had to manually update it. In Firefox it works flawlessly now.

That modal popup can be blocked as well. Ad blockers have element pickers for a reason. No need to wait for some official lists updates.

I noticed it only when logged in. When logged out my UBlock works perfectly. (Note, I havn't logged in for a while, so maybe the situation has improved in the meantime) (Firefox)

I got that modal for some time, switched to yt-dlp for that time, and now I get zero ads or modals again with FF/uBlock. Not sure what they are doing, maybe I'm just lucky.

Does uBlock Origin bypass YouTube Anti-Adblock? This website will tell you.

https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/

Nothing, it works just fine for now for me too. I'd still recommand an open source app called NewPipe over YouTube on FireFox, it seems way less hungry battery-wise... and there is likely also less data collection happening.

Unfortunately newpipe is bizarrely hostile to sponsorblock, which to me has become as important as Adblock itself: https://newpipe.net/blog/pinned/newpipe-and-online-advertisi...

But I definitely also recommend trying out frontends that support it.

I cannot imagine trying to use video while having to run a gauntlet of both YouTube ads and video sponsor segments.

What does sponsorblock provide that hitting the 'L' key a few times to skip ahead doesn't ?

It provides the ability to skip ads without pressing the 'L' key. Meaning that one doesn't have to be at the keyboard to press anything. It also skips to the end of the ad, so you never have to use the 'J' key if you pressed 'L' too many times or if the ad finished 9 seconds ago.

There is a newpipe fork with sponsorblock[1] which works quiet well

[1] https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/org.polymorphicshad...

Oh! Thank you! I knew of NewPipe SponsorBlock but thought it wasn't in F-Droid because the F-Droid folks didn't like that it calls out to the SponsorBlock service. I didn't realize that it was possible to add custom repositories to F-Droid, so now I've done that and it seems to have linked up perfectly. TIL; thanks!

I also prefer NewPipe for longer videos, especially ones I only need audio for. I share to it from the Youtube app typically, which has been getting more and more annoying (from one tap to 3 right now).

it's a tiered rollout. I also had no issues until a few weeks ago. but I usually just need to update the unlock lists and do a hard refresh and I will be back in business for a few days.

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