if ads were normal and unobtrusive. We wouldn't need ad blockers. Instead we get an almost unusable internet where ads take up more and more real estate. I had been running an ad blocker for so many years that when a friend (who doesn't use an ad blocker) showed me a website, the unfiltered experience was horrifying.
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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Instead we get an almost unusable internet where ads take up more and more real estate.
Its even worse than just hurting usability. Lots of ad networks are not policing their advertising customers and malicious payloads have been injected from ads. So allowing ads is a security risk because of the lack of security at the various ad networks.
It's even worse when you consider the entire point of advertising is to deliver a targeted payload at a very specific demographic. So you can target IT folks of a specific company, etc.
I love this movie but honestly it's getting to the point where I can't even watch it without getting upset.
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uBO is not just an ad blocker, its almost a firewall against malware and a tracking filter
I was about to comment something similar but you said it before I did. Sometimes I'll mistakenly open YouTube with Chrome and then I realize I messed up because I have to sit through three, sometimes one-minute long ads just to watch a twenty second video. I'll typically just nope out and switch to Firefox. The worst thing is they're unskippable and I swear for some of them the ad actually pauses if you switch to another tab or browser. I'm getting ads even on super old videos so I'm pretty sure it isn't all to do with the channels themselves monetizing their videos.
3 one minute long adds are better than those 2 hour long prageru racist propaganda videos trying to masquerade as "Educational" content
Im old enough to remember the internet before ads, and with ads became a thing and you had to make sure to keep your speakers low/off all the time less some screaming loud ad popped up somewhere to burst your eardrums at 2am.
There were so many obnoxious, visual cancer ads.
Then they became actual digital cancer by being injection points for viruses and malware, and thus adblockers became a necessity.
And they remain a necessity to this day, for the same reason as they were 20+ years ago.
and yet the ad servers want to blame the end user for adblocking.
not their absolute refusal to moderate or police any of the content they deliver.
CONGRATULATIONS, YOU WON!!!
I went to help out a friend, a few years ago, he runs vanilla Edge, I can't believe anyone actually uses the internet like that.
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I swapped to Chrome years ago because YouTube stopped working right on Firefox.
I've started the process of swapping back to Firefox after 10 years with Chrome over this.
never had a problem with firefox and youtube
It probably didn't have anything to do with Firefox itself. It's likely related to something I messed up in FF or it was something to do with the ancient laptop I had at the time being a junk heap, but I tried Chrome and noticed that the trouble didn't exist there. So I started using Chrome.
I kept using it because of all the google integration, which was really handy when I was using the google business suite to run my own small business. I shut that down two years ago now, so there's nothing really keeping me on Chrome any more.
I swapped back to FF a few days ago and YouTube works fine now. So I'm back on the FF train and giving Google the finger the whole way over banning the adblockers that I liked.
t probably didn’t have anything to do with Firefox itself
It probably did. Google has been caught red-handed with messing with Youtube to break Firefox.
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/
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Yeah if you fiddle around with about:config without knowing exactly what yer doing, shit breaks. Fortunately you can type "about:profiles" in the url box, make a test profile, and mess around as much as you want before nuking your default browser.
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There were a few extensions you could run in firefox that told youtube that it was totally for reals being accessed by a chrome browser.
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Use firefox
And if you don't like Firefox, use one of the Firefox forks. Some of them are very Chrome-like.
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And that is why I went to Firefox once Google announced this bullshit.
Swapping is pretty painless. It even brings over all your passwords and stuff these days. Best get to swapping before Google disable that as well. They'd just love to keep you hostage.
Use a third party password manager, don’t rely on browser default ones
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I take this as a sign that it genuinely still works to block ads and hasn’t sold out and become malware like those others that used to be popular.
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https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/ddkjiahejlhfcafbddmgiahcphecmpfh
Doesn't cover 100% of what uBO did, but it still works just as good IMO with DNS based ad-blocking on top.
Surprised so few people are aware of this. It seems equivalent to me when you give it the same permissions Ublock Origin had.
Agreed. I haven't even found anything that it doesn't block that UbOrigin did.
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