YouTube performance issues have been a topic of discussion among users of Adblock and Adblock Plus, who initially pointed fingers at Google for the slowdowns on the platform. These problems, however, were later identified as stemming from the ad-blocking extensions themselves. Created by the same developer, Adblock and Adblock Plus are widely used on Chrome and Edge browsers, boasting a user base of 113 million as per the Chrome Web Store’s reported statistics.
YouTube performance issues: What you need to know
Over the past weekend, a Reddit post sparked rumors suggesting that Google had implemented measures to decelerate video streaming for users who had ad blockers installed. This alleged action by Google was said to affect various aspects of YouTube’s performance, including longer video buffering times, delayed thumbnail preview loading, choppy transitions to full-screen mode, and sluggish scrolling. Additionally, some users experienced such severe performance issues on Chrome during YouTube playback that it adversely affected their entire operating system’s functionality.
Upon testing the Adblock extension for Chrome, we verified that YouTube performance issues were indeed present, leading to significant slowdowns in site navigation and video loading times. Initially, many users mistook this degradation in performance for internet connectivity problems or potential memory leaks.
Yet, it was soon clear that the YouTube performance issues predominantly affected those using the Adblock and Adblock Plus extensions. Interestingly, reports indicate that subscribers of YouTube Premium did not experience similar performance setbacks, adding complexity to the situation. Given Google’s history of implementing strict measures against ad-blockers, there was speculation that YouTube might be deliberately reducing performance for users with active ad-blocking tools, particularly in certain geographic areas.
In contrast, uBlock Origin, another widely-used ad-blocking extension for Chrome, did not seem to suffer from these issues, suggesting a more extension-specific problem rather than a universal one across all ad-blockers.
Issues related to Adblock extension
A recent issue posted indicates that the root of the YouTube performance issues is tied to version 1.1.1 of the extension’s engine. This version was incorporated into Adblock version 5.17 and Adblock Plus 3.22, both of which were released last week.
Contrary to initial suspicions of Google’s involvement, Raymond Hill, the developer behind uBlock Origin, clarified on X (Twitter) that the performance issues on YouTube were indeed a consequence of the Adblock extensions themselves, not any alterations in Google’s code.
There is a lot of chatter in the last days about how Youtube is slow with content blockers.
Those performance issues affect only the latest version of both Adblock Plus (3.22) & AdBlock (5.17), and afflict more than just Youtube.
uBO is *not* affected.https://t.co/O3g48d2DT9
— R. Hill (@gorhill) January 13, 2024
Hill, utilizing browser profiling tools, pinpointed that the significant slowdown experienced by users was due to the extensive processing time consumed by the content script code of Adblock Plus when operating on the YouTube webpage.
“I investigated a bit the performance regressions, and the cause is many distinct code paths, and affect many sites, those for which the problematic code paths are triggered,” Hill stated.
Raymond Hill further elaborated that these performance issues are not confined solely to YouTube; other websites, particularly those featuring dynamic content updates, are also likely to be affected. He clarified that simply disabling Adblock Plus or Adblock does not immediately rectify these issues. For the extensions to be completely deactivated and the performance to return to normal, users need to reload the web pages several times or open them in new tabs.
In our tests, once we disabled Adblock and refreshed the pages, YouTube’s performance improved markedly, with videos loading swiftly again, even when uBlock Origin was active. The developers behind Adblock are currently investigating these YouTube performance issues.
Why is YouTube slow and what you can do to fix it
Despite their awareness of the issue, they have mentioned their inability to replicate the problem themselves and are hence calling on users to provide feedback to help pinpoint the exact cause.
Thanks for spotting that problem and for reporting it to us. We’re slowly getting similar reports from a few other users, so it does appear to be some problem with one of the changes included in version 3.22. Unfortunately, we aren’t able to reproduce the problem ourselves yet, but we’ve created https://gitlab.com/adblockinc/ext/adblockplus/adblockplusui/-/issues/1576 to keep track of it to help us find the problem and develop a fix for it.
In general, any additional information on this could be helpful, so I’d suggest contacting [email protected], if you’d like to help us with that.
Featured image credit: Kerem Gülen/Midjourney
