There are other alternatives too, like invidious. The yewtu.be instance works decently well for me but limits to 720p I think. There is a list of all running instances somewhere on the github iirc. There’s other instances that allow full HD, just have a search and you should be able to find one.
Well, I just got Redirector last night to check it out and it took me some time to figure out how to get it to work right where I have youtube.com/watch?v=* redirecting to yewtu.be/watch?v=$1 in case there is something funky going on there that causes me to need to have that redirect active.
My YouTube redirect rule is a bit more complex, but works for all shorts, youtu.be and regular youtube links and it supports time stamps and videos that are part of a playlist.
remove the two “amp;” at the end (Lemmy formatting is bad, it replaces an ampersand with & even if you tell it not to…) and redirect to https://%yourinstanceofchoice%/watch?v=$1
Okay, what I was trying to do with Redirector is have it so I can search and browse videos on YouTube, but when I click on something that I want to watch, it forwards me to the same video on YewTu.be instead.
That’s exactly what this is doing. It captures all youtube.com/watch, youtube.com/shorts and youtu.be/ pages and redirects then to the same page on invidious. Just replace %yourinstanceofchoice% with yewtu.be.
If you don’t open videos you want to watch in a new tab, you also have to go to Advanced Options in your rule and tick “HistoryState” else it will bypass the redirect.
What works for me is opening a new Private windows on Firefox, with ublock installed, and then login into YouTube. I do have to login every time I hope a private windows by so far I’ve been able to watch unlimited videos with an ad blocker installed
Try opening your subscription page as usual with your ublock, but then right-click “open in private window” the videos you want to watch. Works for me.
I randomly stopped getting the anti-adblocking. On my gaming PC I never got them, on my laptop they went away after I disabled my adblocking for one video and then re-enabled it. Now I don’t get them at all. Did they give up on me?
They no longer appear for me. The biggest change for me was just using uBlock Origin. Previously I also had Ghostery. If you run multiple extensions for privacy, try dropping them and only using uBlock.
The thing is, I really don’t think, Google would care about Firefox. Firefox is sitting at negligible percentages of usage share. The only real competitor to Chrome is Safari and that’s because of iOS.
I guess, they might impact Safari on macOS with this, but someone would have to try this out to actually see, and ultimately, this could still just be a dumb mistake.
Having said that, Google holds a near-monopoly in both video content and web browsers. They have a special duty to not disadvantage competitors and even if this was an honest mistake, I do think, it deserves a slap on the wrist.
They do have a history of such things happening, yes, which is why my comment exists in the first place. Normally, I would assume this to just be the result of regular shitty management practices paired with regular shitty profit motives.
The history makes it look like they might genuinely have a higher motive here, and I’m saying I still don’t think so, because it would be far too petty and I don’t see them benefitting that much from it.
It might just be a coincidence but I've had a lot of trouble using Invidious or Piped lately too. Videos load and titles load, but video thumbnails don't load for me.
It’s the same with all the other frontends (LibReddit, Nitter, etc.). They never work and everyone is just like “try a different instance!”. How many dozen different instances should I try before I give up?
Shout out to Stealth (Reddit) and Squawker (Twitter), those both work the vast majority of the time without any “instances” to depend on or switch through.
Yeah I might try the others a couple more times before giving up but it’s not gone well for me thusfar. Libreddit and invidious worked for me for like 4 days last time, both crapped out about the same time. It’s annoying to have to repeatedly troubleshoot what used to be something you could basically count on working
Google is blocking popular instances these days, so yeah, you basically need to find an unpopular instance, which usually means it’s new and may not live for long, or it will quickly become popular, because it works, which will cause Google to block it.
I tried it and my main complaint was it was like 720p, so lower quality (noticeable to me just looking at it). But it “just worked” for me. But I’m also not interested in YouTube enough to play this game - if they block me, I stop going there. It seems like they give up blocking me every so often (or something updates IDK).
It looks like also this was against adblocker so, again, not specifically Firefox. Quote from the article itself:
The issue was initially reported as targeting Firefox users, but users online have said they’re seeing the delay in Chrome and Edge, too. Reddit and Hacker News users who’ve examined the code that appears to be causing the delay have said they see no indication that YouTube checks what kind of browser is in use. Mozilla’s senior brand manager Damiano DeMonte wrote in an email to The Verge that “there’s no evidence that this is a Firefox-specific issue.
Reddit and Hacker News users who’ve examined the code that appears to be causing the delay have said they see no indication that YouTube checks what kind of browser is in use
That means nothing, this check could be done on the server side and noone would know
Indeed, but google can just transmit different javascript to different users/browsers/regions etc (that’s why browsers have useragents, so websites can improve browser compatibility according to the circumstances). It can be decided on a whim and noone would know except some coders at google
Except everyone would know. Multiple people across the globe testing different browsers have looked at the same JavaScript code that is being sent to the browser. The check is there, client-side, google isn’t sending a different JavaScript payload for different browsers. Like you said, they could, but that’s not how it currently functions
It’s probably the case that this was good intent given the lack of desktop ARM computing hardware, but they really should let the client decide the video quality.
Someone on the Hacker News cross-post mentioned it, but it seems like they assumed any ARM Linux device that wasn’t detected as running Android was some low-power device like a Raspberry Pi, and didn’t anticipate more powerful devices running bog-standard Linux until Apple Silicon and thus Asahi came along.
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