January 15, 2024 at 11:19AM
The Adblock and Adblock Plus ad blockers caused performance issues on YouTube, initially blamed on Google but later identified to be an issue with the extensions themselves. The extensions slowed video buffering, impacting navigation and video loading. The developers are investigating but are unable to reproduce the problem yet. Other ad blockers like uBlock Origin are not affected.
After reviewing the meeting notes, it is clear that Adblock and Adblock Plus users are encountering performance issues on YouTube. The issues were initially attributed to Google but were later identified as problems within the ad-blocking extensions themselves.
A post on Reddit suggested that videos buffered slowly and navigation became difficult with the ad blockers installed, impacting the performance of the entire operating system and causing significant slowdowns. BleepingComputer confirmed these issues after installing the Adblock Chrome extension.
The performance problems were specifically linked to the Adblock and Adblock Plus ad-blocking extensions, rather than internet speed or memory leak issues. It was noted that YouTube Premium subscribers did not report experiencing these performance issues, adding further complexity to the situation.
The source of the problem was found to be the version 1.1.1 of the extension engine, introduced in Adblock version 5.17 and Adblock Plus 3.22, released the previous week. uBlock Origin developer Raymond Hill confirmed that the issues were caused by the Adblock extensions themselves, not changes in Google’s code.
He identified that the severe performance issues were due to the time consumed by the content script code of Adblock Plus on the YouTube webpage, and noted that these problems may also affect other sites with dynamically updating pages.
Disabling Adblock Plus or Adblock was not enough to resolve the performance issues, as it was necessary to reload web pages multiple times or open them in new tabs for the extension to be fully disabled.
Adblock developers are investigating the performance issues but have been unable to reproduce the problem themselves. They have requested feedback from users to help determine the cause and develop a fix for the issues.
BleepingComputer attempted to contact Adblock and Google for further information, but at the time of publication, neither had responded.
Overall, it is evident that Adblock and Adblock Plus users are experiencing performance issues on YouTube due to the recent release of the extension engine, and the Adblock developers are actively working to address these issues.