You might have noticed that even on Firefox (depending on your lists) YouTube may detect uBlock Origin on Firefox now
There's already a workaround (found, again, here), but I figured I would use this opportunity to tell people that projects like Piped and Invidious exist, which both allow you to watch YouTube without loading their ads, with improved Privacy and (in the case of Piped) even Geoblocking-Circumvention and SponsorBlock out of the box.
They're both great tools, and using something like LibRedirect you can even automatically go to Piped or Invidious when clicking/opening a YouTube link (and more).
Both don't load ads, but unless changed in the settings Individous may still make connections to Google/YouTube to load the video(s) themselves.
Bit of a shameless plug for these projects, but I figured this is a really good time to show these projects as I often see people asking what they are in threads on here
Has Google considered making their advertising engine better? Allow us to skip every ad. Allow us to block all those fucking cryptocurrency scam ads. Forcing me to watch an ad for a company that I'm not interested in guarantees that I will hate that company and never buy their product even if I need it. I will go out of my way to buy something from a company that hasn't tried to ram their advertisements down my throat. If ads weren't so fucking terrible I might agree to watch them.
Unless people mass-migrate away from Chrome-based browsers (basically everything expect Firefox) Google will at one point enable their Web Environment Integrity thing, force all other browsers to enable it too because otherwise a lot of websites will stop working in them, and no alternative frontend will have access to the video streams anymore.
Web environment integrity is a non-starter because it offers avenues for bad actors to enforce "integrity" that forces malware to be loaded as well as legitimate page elements. However, that doesn't mean Google won't keep trying to stop ad blockers, alternative interfaces etc in the future.
Using FF with UBO, absolutely no problems. "May detect"? I'm pretty sure they either can or can't. They're not going to detect some FF with UBO and not others. The only thing that may affect whether or not you're detected is if you're using a VPN or other encryption.
They will actually, as they're looking for specific things to be blocked/altered using JavaScript that is easily affected by enabling certain custom lists. In case you don't believe me, you can look on uBO's official statement regarding this.
Congrats, you’ve managed to make a post in which nothing makes sense
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I'm all for this post, but I feel like someone needs to ask: What features from Youtube am I losing out on by using these alternate front-ends? (instead of just continuing the cat-and-mouse game between uBlock Origin and Google while at leat preserving the same features and UI that we're already very mu ch comfortable with)
You lose:
- Your existing YouTube account, which can only be manually imported (subscriptions)
- Account-Based/Algorithmic Homescreen recommendations
- Some higher resolutions (e.g 4K) (very dependant on instance, I don't have a list of instances with their max resolutions)
- The UI will be somewhat different, but not necessarily hard to navigate
- probably more random stuff idk
