I have been using uBlock Origin (+ LibreWolf) for a long time and have no problems with ads, while other people with other blockers have a lot of problems, YouTube forces them to turn off blockers, worsens the experience, etc. uBlock Origin always seems to work perfectly.

YouTube is starting to slow down videos from starting even with ad blockers on

The last time I remember stuff like this happened, it was because of addon conflicts, fresh Firefox with only ublock origin “fixed it” for many people, indicating some other addon was the problem.

This is unsettling to hear, because I haven’t had an issue in several months on my end. When it used to get bad, the one thing that always seemed to work for me was watching things in private tabs.

I’ve also used the Albanian VPN workaround, and it definitely worked in the past. Good luck, let us know if you find a solution!

Have you tried updating uBlock manually?

Try an encrypted DNS with ad filtering

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/dns/#recommended-providers

This article: https://iter.ca/post/yt-adblock/ crossed the Fediverse a few days ago. It’s informative and the fix at the end might still be relevant.

It confirms several things it seems pretty clear YouTube are doing, and goes into a decent amount of detail.

(Or else the article writer saw a comment of mine where I said certain things were happening and there’s a confirmation feedback loop going on. It’s hard not to reach certain conclusions when different accounts accessed by the same person on the same computer behave in different ways though.)

Every once in a while, Youtube makes some change to how they serve ads, and uBlock stops working for some people for a while. An update will typically come up pretty quickly that fixes this. Odds are tomorrow it will be fine.

uBlock Origin probably just needs its filter lists updated, you can update them by opening the extension, hitting the gears icon, clicking on the “filter lists” tab at the top and selecting update next to any that are outdated.

Personally, I use the nuclear option because fuck google – I have AdNauseam (which includes uBlock Origin), SponsorBlock, PopUpOFF, DeArrow, Return Youtube Dislike, and CanvasBlocker.

If uBlock Origin was working fine until recently, you can try this workaround (it worked for me when YouTube suddenly started showing me “Ad blockers are against YouTube TOS” messages):

Open uBlock settings in Firefox, go to “Filter Lists” and uncheck “uBlock Filters - Quick fixes” under “Built-in”.

Then click “Apply changes” and restart Firefox. Hope this helps.

Switched to LibreWolf and use UBlock origin. Have yet to see it fail.

Freetube is another alternative that have been working for me with an occasional update.

I’ll be looking into invidious and piped next

https://invidious.io/

https://piped.video/

Freetube will allow you to watch vids adfree on Windows desktop.

i came here to use firefox and block youtube ads.

and i’m all out of youtube ads.

UBO and custom DNS works for me in FF. Sometimes I still get blocked so off to an Invidious instance I go (and they’re ad-free too) to watch whatever content I was trying to view.

ETA lots of people use DNS to proxy to Albania which yt doesn’t run ads for that region, they report it works fine but I haven’t tried it personally

UBlock Origin works for me in Firefox, but the last time YouTube was at war with adblockers I had to retore default settings in uBlock every few days.

I can’t remember the process but I think I had to reset the settings and do something with the lists.

You can also try a desktop app like Freetube. There is no algorithm through, if you are looking for that. It sometimes breaks when YouTube makes changes and everything is stored locally, so you have to back up your subscriptions if you plan on reinstalling Windows at some stage.

See if you can default uBlock Origin, that method worked before.