Comment by Kye

1 year ago

Not to WOMM, but as a data point, it's working perfectly for me in Firefox on Windows with uBlock Origin. Is this one of those A/B test things where I'll get it eventually? I know the ad bomb rolled out slowly[0] and we know they're looking for a way to foil ad blocking without drawing bad press and regulatory scrutiny.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23769291

9 comments

Kye

Reply
mrandish  1 year ago

I just checked and YT is normal for me in FF 129.0.2 (64-bit). YT specific add-ons: uBlock Origin, Nova YouTube (userscript with dozens of modules to fix various YT behaviors and UI annoyances), and Enhancer for YouTube (adds more playback speeds, fixes default player size & volume levels).

Since YT in my FF is heavily modified to be not awful, maybe the regression is in something my add-on stack is blocking.

  • inhumantsar  1 year ago

    > Nova YouTube

    looked this up out of curiosity. the only thing resembling a description is "Combine small plugins, expanding the possibilities of YouTube." which is pretty useless.

    what all does this do?

    • mrandish  1 year ago

      Here is what the Nova YT interface looks like on my Firefox. Each section is a separate module. Modules don't do anything if not activated so you can choose how you want YT to behave/appear.

      https://i.imgur.com/lMKaJ5t.jpeg

      After putting the number of videos in a grid row back to a useful number, things I especially like are changing video thumbnails back to a still that's actually from the fucking video, instead of a misleading click-bait image. I also like the option of changing all caps and removing emojis from video titles. It also has options to automatically remove a bunch of the stupid shit YT pushes in the UI I don't want to see.

      After I got it set up, I found it literally shocking how much better YT is - yet in many ways, it's just restoring YT to the way it used to appear and work when its focus was user-centric instead of user manipulative. Since about ~2016 we've all been slowly frog-boiled by YT making the site slightly more annoying every month through iterative A/B testing optimizing for ad revenue. I literally can't go back to using stock YT now.

      Each module has an info link which points to its entry in the wiki: https://github.com/raingart/Nova-YouTube-extension/wiki/plug.... Since I'm not familiar with YT's terminology for labeling all their UI elements, it initially took a little experimentation to see what some of the module options do but it's quick to change a setting, tab back to YT, refresh and see the result.

      2 replies →

    • dakial1  1 year ago

      This Nova YT addon is outside Firefox Addons page for some a specific reason? Seems a little cumbersome to install

amanzi  1 year ago

Same here, using Firefox 129.0.2 on Windows 10. uBlock running and I also have Firefox's "Enhanced Tracking Protection" turned up to max.

I did have issues with YouTube recently - I was getting some of the same symptoms described in the Reddit post. But tracked it down to me changing my user-agent to Chrome, which I had forgotten about. This was also causing issues with reCaptcha and Cloudflare-protected sites.