Sorry for continuing the hijack, but maybe this can be fodder for a YouTube rant?
During the current cold snap in Texas, my Dad’s utility company advised him to use his whole house electric furnace instead of space heaters, because the furnace is more efficient. So it uses less power for resistive electric coils to heat the entire house to a comfortable temperature, than using resistive heat for just the bedroom? Got it. Maybe it has something to do with 220 versus 110?
Do they know he has an electric furnace (or is it common in your area)? It may be that they wanted people to use their natural gas furnace instead of space heaters to take some of the load off the grid.
The only thing I have noticed [Adblocker Ultimate] is live streaming videos suddenly locking up, requiring a page reload; prerecorded vids have shown zero issues however. But the lockups are something dating back to before the New Year.
A search shows that only about 35% of homes in Texas use natural gas for heating. He doesn’t even have gas service. For me, in Colorado, my utility provides both electricity and gas, but perhaps it is a poor assumption that his electric provider would also be his gas provider, if he had one.
To keep it on YouTube, Project Farm did a nice review of space heaters a few weeks ago. Telling that he measured energy use, and how quick they could heat a space, but not efficiency, like he does with generators.
If the whole house system is a heat pump, those can be more than 100% efficient (I know that sounds like hooey, but it’s true, because they don’t generate the heat, they just move it around)
Yes, that’s about the only way the utility’s advice makes sense. My Dad hates heat pumps, based on the one we had in our house growing up. His complaint was it just blew cold air. All I know is my bedroom was at the very end of the duct work, and was always the hottest or coldest in the house. Really, Texas is an ideal place for heat pumps, and given the size of his AC condenser, he could suck lots of heat out of the 22F air.
And obligatory YouTube reference with an obligatory Technology Connections reference to his videos on heat pumps. I am genuinely happy that there exist people in this world who can be so contagiously excited about a mini-split system.
It’s interesting, because some of the advice here in the UK has been ‘just heat one or two rooms’ - notionally this advice is for people struggling to afford their utility bills, but the trouble with this advice was that the unheated rooms get damp and grow mould, which is a health hazard.
Moderating:
Please drop the hijack about electric heat, or take it to a new thread. But this thread is about YouTube and and blockers.
These statements that Youtube is slowing down the site for people who have adblockers seems to be completely incorrect–instead it is a bug in ABP/AdBlock adblocker software.
gorhill writes:
It’s perfectly fine and valid to question the pile of JS code executing in Youtube webpages, but in this specific instance the performance issues are caused by ABP/AdBlock. The issue has been acknowledged by the developers[1]. It affects only the latest version of both blockers, not previous versions, so it makes no sense to keep speculating Google is at the root of that specific issue.
Out of curiosity I investigated these performance issues myself using profiling sessions[2] and the faulty code is definitely in the latest versions of these extensions.
[1] https://gitlab.com/adblockinc/ext/adblockplus/adblockplusui/…
If you don’t recognize gorhill; he is the lead developer of the uBlock Origin adblocking extension which many of us recommend.
I’m not seeing any problems at the moment, since I installed ublock on Firefox, and update it periodically.
Thanks to whoever suggested that!
Mind you, I’m accessing from the UK; don’t know if that makes any difference…?
I still haven’t seen any problems recently from uBlock Origin including any slowdowns. I hope the good times continue. 
Same here. As I’ve mentioned upthread a few times, I have yet to see any of the issues described in this thread. Firefox, with uBlock Origin, running on Linux. I haven’t had to fiddle with uBlock at all, I don’t have any special add-ons for it. It just updates itself and chugs along.
My Firefox slowdowns are irregular and…odd. I am watching a video and it seems like it starts buffering…but the buffer indicator shows no problem and if I click 1-2 seconds ahead it all starts again. And then seconds later…it buffers again. Yet, the next four videos I watch never have any problem at all.
If I watch a YouTube video embedded on some webpage (like here)…no problem at all.
I have searched for this problem and found many on Reddit describing exactly this from a year or so ago but no solutions. Maybe it is a Firefox glitch. I dunno. Still working on it (I am running the latest version of FF and uBlock).
I DID experience the problem with YT threatening and finally shutting me out. I could then use an incognito session, logon and get access again. What has changed is I haven’t had any issues for a few weeks. Lots of ad-free YT viewing as it was for years before.
I’ve noticed some changes in YouTube in the last few days. I’m usually using Chrome/Windows 10 to access YouTube and Ghostery as an ad blocker.
First, YouTube’s objection to ad blockers comes and goes. When is it present, I just use extra keystrokes (Copy URL to clipboard with Ctrl C/Shft+Ctrl N/Paste with Ctrl V) to enter incognito mode. Sometimes I get a bypassable message even in incognito mode that YouTube does not allow ad blockers, but not always.
Second, in the last few days, using normal browsing mode but with Ghostery set to restrict the site, YT plays a few seconds of ads at the start of every video anyway. It can be bypassed after a few seconds, but this is a new behavior.
I checked with Ghostery, which made several suggestions, none of which work or I have the settings already enabled as prescribed.
So it appears that YouTube has found a way around ad blockers, or at least this ad blocker.
If it gets really bad, I guess I’ll switch to Firefox or Duckduckgo, or try another ad blocker, but Chrome has many features that I like and am familiar with, so I hope things improve.
They are obviously rolling something out gradually. I got my first “no ad blockers” note this weekend. Using adblockerplus on chrome.
I got my first warning while on Brave this morning. Brave has a built-in blocker, and I haven’t added any extensions like uBlock. So, I upgraded Brave and it seems to be working again.
Ever since this started I have limited my YT time and have never run into even a warning without doing anything special.
However, starting last week I did get hit with the “background playing” issue which looks like it may kill YT for me since I can’t find a workaround for it. That’s the overwhelming majority of what I use YT for is playing music in the background while I do other things on my PC. When I try to do that, the playback stops. Even if there are no ads it would still render it unusable.
And the current price for Premium would seem like a good deal in order to avoid this, but given their recent track record of sudden increases and terms of service changes, I’m not going to sign up. Who knows if in a few months it won’t be $30 a month for the basic ad-filled tier?
Still nothing at all with my Firefox/uBlock Origin/PiHole combo. Same set up at home and work and haven’t seen any of this yet on either device.
Do we know what causes this phenomenon?
One workaround is to bypass the regular youtube.com interface and download the entire file(s) before playing them. Since they are saved locally on your computer, there will not be any buffering pauses, and of course no ads.