I’ve been using Opera browser for a while. Among other things, it has built-in ad blocking.
Last night (I think it was) Opera decided to push out a revision. Some things changed visually, no big deal. But they seem to have changed the way ad block works with YouTube. Before I never saw ads on YouTube. Now, every video starts with a 30-second ad (which I can skip after 4 seconds), which incidentally isn’t an ad, it says YouTube survey, and asks for my age (to improve their advertising). The oddest part is that there is no mechanism provided for me to type in my age. So it’s a completely useless 4 seconds of my time wasted every time I want to watch a video.
Any other Opera users having this happen? Anyone know why this attempt at a survey is so useless (if I wanted to participate in it, which I don’t)?
I use Firefox as my main browser, but I do have Opera on my machine as a secondary.
Just opened it up, and yes, they seem to have pushed out a major update and ads are now showing up on YouTube. It doesn’t relly affect me, though if I was using Opera a a main browser I’d be looking at installing an add-on ad blocker.
You could poke around Opera’s own forums.
I went on the forums to search for this particular issue, and didn’t find anyone complaining about it. I generally hate product forums, they are a pit of time wastage and I never find what I want. However, in this case I was reminded of what the popup said when I turned my computer on yesterday, which was that my Opera had been “upgraded” to Opera One, and I found that there was a way to get back to just Opera.
But I didn’t do that. I did this (below) instead, much easier and probably more reliable.
And now all is well. They’ve also removed the Home button for some incomprehensible reason, but I have found I don’t need it, I just put my home page link on the Speed Dial page.
My work computer got the update but not my personal laptop. I don’t watch much youtube at work so I can’t say whether there’s been a change. However, I did turn off whatever island tabs are supposed to do/be.
I used Opera for forever, then I switched to Chrome, then I de-googled my digital life and I switched to Vivaldi.
I looked at Opera then but that wasn’t for me.
(Opera tried to be something more than a browser, e-mail/torrents/rss/ all in one program…. It made me nervous)
I haven’t ever been aware of nor used any of that. My only issue with Opera, up to now, has been that I’ve come across a couple of places that would not guarantee to work on any except the four (is it four?) main browsers. They both did actually work on Opera.
I wasn’t aware of Vivaldi, it sounds tempting.
Use whatever non-Google browser you like;)