If you’ve been chronically online for the past couple of days, you might’ve seen the discourse surrounding YouTube and how it’s apparently causing people’s computers to slow down on social media and Reddit forums. As it turns out, despite everyone’s feelings about the ads on YouTube, it’s not the video platform’s fault.
Specifically, the accusation going around was that for those who had adblockers installed onto their browser, they would experience not just a laggier YouTube browsing and watching experience—videos taking longer to load, comments section not appearing when scrolling down—but also see major spikes in CPU usage, which meant that the whole system, not just specifically YouTube, would be experiencing slowdowns.
However, the performance issues appear to be coming from the AdBlock and AdBlock Plus extension itself. Soon after the mob against YouTube began, some users noticed that the issue only really affected AdBlock and AdBlock Plus users, while those who had other adblockers like uBlockOrigin installed did not see any performance dips. That’s actually because the problem stems from bugs in AdBlock and AdBlock Plus, which share the same codebase.
See issue tracker for both Adblock Plus and AdBlock:https://t.co/dfZM7UjrkX
— R. Hill (@gorhill) January 13, 2024
A reminder that both blockers are owned by the same entity and use the same filtering engine — using both at the same time make no sense.
Eyeo, the folks who run AdBlock, have since claimed that they have fixed the performance issues causing the higher CPU usage and also bad YouTube experience. If you’re sticking with AdBlock or AdBlock Plus, you’ll want to update to AdBlock 5.17.1 and AdBlock Plus 3.22.1 once they’re available. And, for what it’s worth, YouTube also denied the accusations that they were the ones causing slowdowns, stating that they were unrelated to their adblocker detection efforts.
