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Comment by yathern | Hacker News Reader

Coincides suspiciously with the removal of uBlock on Chrome.

The timing makes this the most obvious alternative when you find yourself getting ads again - they're hoping to capture the portion of adblock users that are unwilling or unaware that they can switch off of Chrome (or continue using uBlock on chrome for the time being if you ignore their warnings). To add insult to injury, it only stops "most ads".

I say this as a long time subscriber to YouTube Music + Premium. I want to support the people, services, or content I value - and doing so directly with money is much more appealing to me than doing so through ads. But when you ask for money and still show ads, I get a particularly bad taste in my mouth. (See Netflix and Hulu's half-ad-supported tiers)

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>Coincides suspiciously with the removal of uBlock on Chrome.

When was it removed? It's still on the chrome web store, and google's docs suggests they were removing manifest v2 extensions as early as October last year, so if they launched premium lite any time in the past 4 months, you could have plausibly claimed "Coincides suspiciously with the removal of uBlock on Chrome".

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate...

For me it was removed 3 days ago, and around 70%~ of my friend group had it removed around the same time.

Swapped to firefox not looking back.

They recently started disabling MV3 extensions automatically but you can still enable them back in Developer Mode (probably for a few more months until the code is fully dropped). On my machine they were disabled about 3-4 days ago.

They started disabling the old MV2 extensions. MV3 extensions like uBlock Origin Lite are even recommended on chrome store

Oops, I meant disabling MV2 extensions. Unfortunately my comment is not editable anymore.

Does it?

Because uBlock Origin Lite works on Chrome, and seems to currently block YouTube ads just fine...

uBlock Origin Lite doesn't support fetching filter lists from the internet (all lists are hard-coded in the extension itself) so every time YouTube tweaks their ads, you need to wait (potentially, multiple days) for Google to review and approve an updated extension. Very clear incentive mismatch.

Can't YouTube change the ad serving domain every day making all MV3 ad block extensions useless (because of the hardcoded list + review delay)?

Yep, that's exactly the incentive mismatch! A great feature of (regular, non-Lite) uBlock Origin are exactly its frequently-updated "quick fixes" and "unbreak" filter lists. The former updates every 12 hours, and has been instrumental in keeping the YouTube experience smooth https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1etvawp/youtu...

I'm still using uBlock Origin on Chrome just fine, I don't even see a warning that it'll be removed

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