Ad blocker users on YouTube have recently reported a five-second delay when playing videos in the Firefox browser. This issue has been linked to Google’s efforts to combat these programs, as ad blocking extensions are believed to be the cause of the delay.
One user, vk6, shared their experience on Reddit by showing that when they played a YouTube video in Firefox, the screen went black a few seconds before the video started. However, when they switched to Chrome, the video started playing automatically.
The uBlock Origin Reddit forum claims that this delay is not a bug in Firefox but rather a code that Google injected into YouTube. This code is identified as 5E3 in the polymer script link. In early November, YouTube confirmed that it was implementing global measures to combat ad blockers in search engines. As a result, there has been an increase in uninstalls of ad blockers and installations of alternative ad blockers such as AdGuard, AdLock and Ghosteri.
Google and YouTube’s fight against ad blockers is based on their reliance on advertising as their main source of revenue. However, concerns have been raised about whether this may be violating user privacy by using spyware to detect the use of these programs in browsers. Privacy activist Alexander Hanf reported the issue to the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), alleging that YouTube’s blocker detection system uses illegal JavaScript code under European Union law.