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Recent updatesJanuary 16:This article was originally published on January 15. After comment from YouTube and further evidence drawn from other sources, I’ve updated it to reflect the story’s development.Click hereto jump to the latest information.
Recent updatesJanuary 16:This article was originally published on January 15. After comment from YouTube and further evidence drawn from other sources, I’ve updated it to reflect the story’s development.Click hereto jump to the latest information.
Recent updates
January 16:This article was originally published on January 15. After comment from YouTube and further evidence drawn from other sources, I’ve updated it to reflect the story’s development.Click hereto jump to the latest information.
AdBlock users have been reporting widespread performance issues with the extension enabled on YouTube, and while suspicion justifiably fell on YouTube’s head, the problem may not lie in the platform itself.
In athreadposted to the YouTube subreddit over the weekend (thanks,9to5Google) users noted that having AdBlock enabled caused slow load times and increased CPU usage, as one userwrites: “This messes up the resources on the computer as a whole. It just kills chrome it seems.”
From what I could see the increase was pretty consistent—so not a dangerous spike—but lower-end laptops mainly used for browsing could start having heat problems. At best it’s inconvenient and annoying.
This has led to troubleshooting paranoia, as sudden and unexplained performance dips can be a sign of hardware problems. User JotaroKujoxXx says they were “wondering why my laptop ran like a fucking jet for the last few days”, whileanother commenterreplies: “Yeah I’ve been deleting shit randomly thinking it was my storage space problem.”
While YouTube has come under severe suspicion—including from myself—said suspicion was not entirely unwarranted. In November of last year,TheVerge reporteda five-second loading delay on other browsers running ad blockers, and the company’s statements created a solid M.O for this kind of thing.
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The report stated that YouTube’s communications manager Christopher Lawton “said that users will keep seeing issues like this as YouTube’s ad-blocker detection methods improve”. These measures have made the company first-in-line to blame for any problems with these extensions—even when, as it turns out, it’s (relatively) innocent.
YouTube responds, blame may lie in AdBlock Update
That’s to be taken with whatever pinches of salt you deem fit, though there’s been some compelling evidence surfacing on AdBlock’s github page which suggests that YouTube is innocent in the whole debacle, past transgressions aside.
(Image credit: @gorhill on Twitter/X.)
“I investigated a bit the performance regressions, and the cause is many distinct code paths, [which] affect many sites” wrote Hill, later highlighting sites whichupdate dynamically. “Since it affects both Adblock Plus and AdBlock, the performance regression hits harder those who had the bad idea to use both at once.”
It should bealsonoted that Hill doesn’t have much to gain from pointing this stuff out. uBlock Origin is free, open-source, and doesn’t take donations. Instead, asHill writes on the project’s GitHub wiki: “Have a thought for the maintainers of the various [block] lists. These lists are everything. I can not emphasise this enough.”
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