If you’ve been experiencing what can only be described as a torturous experience on YouTube, with videos taking an excruciatingly long time to load or the comment section just outright not loading at all, we’ve got news for you. It’s not a YouTube problem but rather, it’s an AdBlock problem.
Here’s the thing: most of you probably know that YouTube and its parent company, Alphabet, recently renewed their war on ad blockers, having gone so far as to say that it is launching a campaign to stop users from avoiding the usual barrage of ads. That, or getting them to sign on for its Premium membership.
There is a lot of chatter in the last days about how Youtube is slow with content blockers.
Those performance issues affect only the latest version of both Adblock Plus (3.22) & AdBlock (5.17), and afflict more than just Youtube.
uBO is *not* affected.https://t.co/O3g48d2DT9
— R. Hill (@gorhill) January 13, 2024
But again, despite the slowdown having shown many users uninstalling AdBlock and AdBlock Plus from their browser after the declaration of war, it was found that the issue of lag was due not to a YouTube crackdown but the ad blockers themselves. According to a Gitlab thread spotted by 9to5Google, the issue stems from a bug report, covering “performance issues” that were introduced with version 3.22 of AdBlock Plus, and that blaming the video streaming service entirely is an “incorrect diagnosis”. Making matters worse, the bug also caused a spike in CPU usage, which in turn led to a spike in overall temperatures of the component.
YouTube has since told other tech sites that it denies any delays in loading to be from their end. At the time of writing, Eyeo, the publisher and owner of both AdBlock and AdBlock Plus, says that the issue has been resolved. So, if you’re still adamant on using AdBlock or AdBlock Plus, you’ll want to update the extensions to version 5.17.1 and 3.22.1, respectively. On a related note, you’ll want to run one or the other, and not both simultaneously, given that the two of them use the same filtering engine anyway.
(Source: Github, Ars Technica, 9to5Google)
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