this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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If I understand correctly, there's nothing about Firefox that makes ad blockers any harder to detect. What can Firefox and uBlock do to stop Google from blocking adblock users on the site?
That said, I use Firefox and uBlock myself, and I've yet to see YouTube stop me from using the site.
It doesn't matter if YouTube can detect uBlock. The great thing about uBlock is you can just block the anti-adblock script. Since Javascript is executed on the user's computer, it's trivial to just tell your computer to ignore it. And moving it to server side would cost them too much money in processing power.
That's why they want everyone to adopt their DRM, so they don't have to worry about it.
This logic is so flawed lol. It's also completely trivial for them to detect when their anti-adblock script has been blocked. If it gets blocked, then they can just stop serving you videos.
There are websites that already do this; it's not theoretical. The website just doesn't work if it detects an adblocker.
Whether or not it's trivial to detect depends on the method used to block it. It already is an arms race, and said race will continue.
Ok but do they know we know they know we know they know?!
Didn't Spotify do this a while back, they made threats of account bans as well. In the end it was bypassed and you can still use Adblock in the browser or adfree clients on desktop (or just block ads across device with Adguard or Portmaster), though honestly Spotify kind of sucks in my opinion (usually doesn't have the music I want and has UI unresponsiveness).
OK, show us an example. I've never run across a website that adblockers just didn't work on, but maybe you know of one. Give us an example, and we'll see if we can bypass that. Then we'll know which of us understands how Javascript works, and which doesn't.