Have you found YouTube slow for some time? You are not the only one. However, Google has nothing to do with it, contrary to what we believed! This is actually a bug affecting the AdBlock extension.
Since last November, YouTube has generalized the blocking of ad blockers on its platform. So, when you use one, the platform displays an annoying pop-up window that asks you to deactivate it or subscribe to the YouTube Premium subscription – for 12.99 euros per month, it removes advertisements, allows you to download videos for offline and background playback, and provides access to the music streaming service YouTube Music. And you can’t close the window until 30 to 60 seconds have passed! Suffice to say that this makes viewing and listening somewhat laborious… Fortunately, some ad blockers are still effective, such as Ublock Origin and Ghostery (see our article). But on top of that, some users have recently noticed that the platform slows down if an extension of this type is detected on the browser. It was enough for an outcry to take place against Google! However, it seems that the Internet giant has nothing to do with it. The problem actually comes from AdBlock.
Ad Blockers on YouTube: much longer loading times
As spotted by a user on Reddit, when you had such a blocker, the video loaded much slower, to the point of giving the impression that YouTube was suffering from technical problems. Result: in addition to videos taking a long time to load – up to thirty seconds –, previews were not displayed and Theater and Full Screen modes did not work correctly. The only way to fix this was to turn off the ad blocker or upgrade to YouTube Premium. Everyone thought Google was the culprit and was sneakily continuing its war against ad blockers. This would hardly have been surprising when we know that YouTube slows down its platform if you use it from Firefox or Edge, according to the testimonies of certain Internet users and a line of code discovered on the streaming site. However, this is not the case.
In a press release addressed to AndroidCentralGoogle denied being the cause of the problem: “Recent reports of slow loading times on YouTube have nothing to do with our ad blocker detection efforts”. For his part, Raymond Hill, a developer of the uBlock Origin extension, explained that the latter was not affected by the problem. In reality, it was a bug affecting AdBlock. The company behind the extension, Eyeo, however, fixed the problem with versions 5.17.1 of AdBlock and 3.22.1 of AdBlock Plus. If the problem still persists for you, check that your extension is up to date, and everything should be fine!