YouTube seems to be intensifying its crackdown on ad blockers, with a recent statement by the company suggesting that ad-blocking extensions might be causing the website to load slowly irrespective of the browser they use. According to YouTube communications manager Christopher Lawton's statement to The Verge, "users using ad blockers may have experienced suboptimal viewing" and those who have already uninstalled such extensions but are still having problems should try clearing their cache and cookies to fix it. Lawton added that ad-block users will continue having issues like these as YouTube improves its ad-block detection algorithm. The issue was highlighted last week when, hundreds of users on Reddit complained that they were seeing a significant delay when trying to open YouTube on popular internet browsers, especially Mozilla Firefox. When users tried to load YouTube on Firefox, the page was mostly blank for a few seconds with a handful of background elements loading without any content. While many assumed that it was a connection issue and that the problem might be limited to Firefox, some Edge and Chrome users said that they were affected as well. Last week, Google said it would disable Chrome extensions using Manifest V2 in 2024, which is said to break numerous popular ad-blockers. Earlier this month, YouTube said it was globally cracking down on ad blockers explaining that they violate the company's terms of service. Users who had these extensions installed were shown a stern warning asking them to disable ad-blockers on YouTube if they wanted to continue watching videos on the platform. If you want to watch videos on YouTube without ads, the only way to do so is by either adding YouTube to your ad blocker's whitelist or purchasing a YouTube Premium subscription, which costs Rs 129 per month or Rs 1,290 annually for individuals.
