They've also started to be really aggressive against VPNs. I've tried Private Internet Access, Mulvad and AirVPN and often I have to cycle through 5-15(!) servers before YouTube stops saying "sign in to confirm you're not a bot".

Discord has started to become absurdly aggressive with it too, to the point that they don't even let you load messages whilst logged in if you're on a VPN.

It really makes me feel like there will be an inflection point in a few years, where the internet is cleaved in two. You'll have the 'free' internet that is full of interesting stuff but also full of malware, spam and scams, and you'll have the squeaky clean corporate internet, basically a facsimile of WeChat's super-app, of which you'll only have access with a government ID. No VPNs or anti-fingerprinting allowed.

I use Firefox + uBlock Origin on both Linux (Debian 12) and on Android to watch Youtube without ads and it works without issue.

I use it on Firefox and Safari on Mac OS (mainly Safari), and it's been OK except it's started doing a thing where it blips a bit after roughly the first 1sec of video plays.

I wonder if being a YouTube Premium subscriber is also a factor here. I do pay for it so I don't see ads. But maybe the way ads are being served/injected has changed things for the worse for people that get them.

YT works pretty flawlessly for me with firefox on debian. What's the issue you're seeing?

I'm using Firefox.

I use Firefox with uBlock and besides a couple of times where video start was delayed by a few seconds it has been working as well as before.

Interesting. I use Firefox and it works flawlessly for me. I wonder if it's a computing power thing?

Yeah, big same here. It’s pretty frustrating, because I pay for YouTube premium, but cannot use my preferred browser. I have to use Chromium in order to have it work reliably. Doubly so considering it worked fine in Firefox for YEARS… until maybe six months ago?

It feels like something the FTC should be investigating, or perhaps a European equivalent, but I doubt it will.

I use Chrome and it's not good. They recently removed ability to force AV1 to only low resolution videos and as a result I had to disable HW acceleration in Chrome because accelerated AV1 decoding is broken on Steam Deck.

It feels like "serving you the video you actually want to see" has become some kind of unimportant side quest, as opposed to serving you the crap (Ads, Shorts, recommendations, comments, sponsored content) that they would rather you be looking at.

Firefox

I've been seeing weird stuff where the video will play but the page is unresponsive: can't click to pause, can't click the time index bar to move to a different point in the video, etc. Then I close the tab, and the audio keeps playing! It will play for 10-15 seconds before cutting out. Bizarre. . .

I had that happen some week ago too! I had to clear site data + cookies for YouTube in Firefox before I got it to work again.

I can no longer watch videos on YouTube with Firefox.

When Firefox dies, the last glimmer of hope will go out.

I experience this, but only with YouTube Shorts. Video loads, but none of the elements around it.

That's never happened for me and I normally watch 5-10+ YouTube videos daily. Firefox.

That sounds pretty nice. Is there a way to do it on purpose?

I've never seen that. I use Firefox.

That happens to me about 50% of the time. I assume it's google engineers not testing on Firefox.

Are you running any extensions that modify content?

Yes happens sometimes to me, Vivaldi.

This has happened to me frequently.

Also many times, the video won't play. If I reload the page, then it will play.

I have, and recently, i nothing is loading until i open a new video in another tab, then all of a sudden both pages start loading and playing :s

yt-dlp + 4K works fine for me. The only special thing I remember doing is adding the impersonate feature (which it prompts you to do if it needs it). In other words, instead of `uv tool install yt-dlp`, run `uv tool install yt-dlp[default,curl-cffi]`

The version in the Arch repos does not include the impersonate feature.

Does it? Why do they play perfectly fine after being downloaded?

I have the same issue. I think it's because I'm adblocking because if I try in chrome with no adblocker it loads the ads instantly.

But eh either 5s of black screen or 60s of ads. I tried watching a 15 min yt video without adblock and it had 5 ad breaks with some unskippable ads.

I have no problems with YouTube at all. Perhaps it's because I pay for Premium (primarily to get YouTube music).

Regardless, Google services getting worse over time is becoming a law rather than a tendency.

They limit the buffer to around 30secs or so like all other streaming services but otherwise 95%+ of the time it just plays smoothing with no buffering at all from start to end. YouTube is generally in the top 3 of the video streaming services I use. Even on 4G wireless (which I occassionally use) it works well enough which is impressive as other video steaming services struggle (with the sole exception of Netflix which is probably the only one better than YouTube).

No issues here for me with uBO, logged in or not, no premium

No idea what you are talking about. I don’t have premium and use in both logged in and logged out.

> That's a bit like complaining no cars have trouble because your Fiat doesn't have a problem.

No. Because even if it might be complicated, any website developer can test their website against a wide array of browsers, in a more or less automated way.