YouTube Allegedly Imposes Arbitrary 5-Second Delay On Firefox, Company Blames Ad Blockers

YouTube Allegedly Imposes Arbitrary 5-Second Delay On Firefox, Company Blames Ad Blockers

The recent ad-blocker saga around YouTube has been a messy if not frustrating one, as the company began its global-scale efforts to crack down on the use of ad blockers. Safe to say the Internet didn’t take this lightly, and thus ensued a David vs. Goliath battle among ad blocker communities and Google itself.

Earlier this week, Reddit user vk6_ posted a video demonstrating YouTube artificially imposing a 5-second delay on Mozilla Firefox before the page’s content loads as normal. However, when the user modified the user agent to Google Chrome through the extension (it basically tells the website what kind of browser you are using), that delay simply went away – making this a very suspicious case of anti-competitive practices that the company landed itself in plenty of hot water right now.

I was unable to recreate this issue with Firefox with uBlock Origin installed, though it’s probably worth noting that it’s in guest mode – so that could affect things. That said, it’s also possible that uBlock Origin, as one of the most aggressive “anti-anti-adblock” solutions facing YouTube right now may have circumvented this at this time.

In a reply to Android Authority, YouTube’s statement blames ad blockers for the reason of the 5-second delay (and unrelated to the browsers used), as it is by design to deter the use of ad blockers and to persuade users into buying the monthly YouTube Premium subscription. It reads:

To support a diverse ecosystem of creators globally and allow billions to access their favorite content on YouTube, we’ve launched an effort to urge viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium for an ad free experience. Users who have ad blockers installed may experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using.

Ad blocking is very much a cat-and-mouse game, so cracking down on these extensions is always going to be difficult, if not outright impossible. However, Google does intend to implement a new extension architecture, Manifest V3, that has the potential to limit the capabilities of content blockers like the aforementioned. While the company cited privacy and security as the reason for this change, it has since been widely criticized for attempting to tighten its grip on the Internet at large, as a company whose incomes are virtually all contributed by advertising.

Source: Tom’s Hardware | Android Authority

Pokdepinion: …and the adblock war rages on.