YouTube Escalates War on Ad Blockers (mashable.com) 187
An anonymous reader shares a report: Multiple YouTube users are now reporting on social media that YouTube is serving them with blank ads or black screens before a video when they are using an ad-blocker extension. The black screens appear for the length of a typical YouTube pre-roll or ad insert before displaying the actual content of the video the viewer wants to watch.
do it (Score:5, Insightful)
i fucking double dog dare you.
Re:do it (Score:5, Insightful)
Their site, their right. I quit visiting them when they said that they didn't want anyone with ad blockers to visit. I highly recommend this approach. It's both ethical and convenient. (AFAIKT, YouTube is basically a time wasting replacement for other forms of instruction. Either that or just a waste of time.)
YouTube is like PowerPoint on steroids.
Re:do it (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, yes. When I want simple info, such as how to fish some Windows idiocy, I'm looking for a terse paragraph. Not a video with 2 minutes first thanking me for supporting the channel, followed by 3 minutes showing me how to bring up regedit etc with warnings that my goldfish will explode if I do it wrong and please backup.
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Meant to say fix not fish, but actually finding simple info on the search engines is a bit like fishing nowadays...
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Re:do it (Score:5, Insightful)
Their site, their right.
That's true - but "my browser, my right" is equally true. They're within their rights to serve ads, and to block users who block ads. I'm within my rights to block ads to the best of my ability using whatever tools are available to me.
YouTube is like PowerPoint on steroids.
That's often true. But learning by watching video of somebody welding, or working wood, or machining metal, or drawing / painting, or playing an instrument, or any number of other things, is vastly more effective than learning from a PowerPoint presentation could ever be.
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Honestly, I am fine with this. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a cost to running YouTube. When you use a free service, you become the product.
If you don't want to watch an advert or pay for the premium ad-free service, then YouTube is under no obligation to even show you the content at all.
Re:Honestly, I am fine with this. (Score:4, Informative)
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If you only use YouTube to watch angry right-wing screeds that's a great option.
Re:Honestly, I am fine with this. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the big difference is that Rumble primarily exists to serve that kind of content, so that's most of what's on there.
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>"I think the big difference is that Rumble primarily exists to serve that kind of content, so that's most of what's on there."
No, Rumble exists to serve ANY type of content. They will gladly accept/host whatever people want to reasonably place there (as long as it doesn't break law). But only about 1/6th of the podcasts I regularly watch are also on Rumble. If it is on Rumble, I make sure that I do watch it there and NOT on YouTube. The content creators can also less-censor themselves as a bonus.
We
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>"it's not like an open-source app because it's not just an app, it's a media platform, like YouTube or Tiktok."
I wasn't trying to frame it as FOSS (although now I see it could certainly look that way). But it is an alternative platform that does fight against huge corporate control of YouTube. We desperately need competition in the video platform sphere. I don't expect that will come from FOSS any time soon, unfortunately.
If you want FOSS (Score:2)
It is P2P and lawful takedown requests are handled using a simple, plaintext blacklist, which because the app is FOSS, can be overridden with ease. They literally do the absolute bare minimum required by law and only pay lip service to banning content (though anything banned won't show on the Odysee website). To trick for-profit creators in
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It's far from the best alternative platform to fight YouTube's control, in fact it might be the worst. Among closed-source commercial options there's Nebula and Vimeo off the top of my head. But I think the best might be PeerTube, which is actually open-source and self-hosted:
https://joinpeertube.org/ [joinpeertube.org]
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If those are the sort of ads you see then it is probably you that is the problem in the sort of content you browse and search for.
You assume that ads are based on user interaction with the platform.
I have seen comments quite to the contrary in at least 1 YT channel that was totally apolitical per it's creator. It regularly shows the ongoing challenges of running a sawmill.
Re: Honestly, I am fine with this. (Score:2)
Yeah, they started showing crap-tons of non-skippable ads with black screens at the head the other day and I just gave up and went away.
It's not like I'm regularly not seeing their ads anyway. What gives?
Re: Honestly, I am fine with this. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's even worse if you do watch the ads and don't block them! If you do everything right, youtube still treats you like crap. Why does it say "skip in 5 seconds" and then 5 seconds later it starts over with "skip in 10 seconds"? This is on TV with no adblocks whatsoever. Then, I watch 5 seconds of the video and decide I don't like it and move on - I immediately am forced to watch some ads before the next video... Sometimes it feels like more time is spent watching ads than watching videos, which feels like a broken model.
On PC, when I do disable adblock for youtube, it then gives me a 90 second unskippable ad for something repulsive.
So that's with me seeing a crap-ton of youtube ads every day. Go ahead and block them to get a blank screen, they're treating the audience like last week's herring whether or not they use adblock.
Re: Honestly, I am fine with this. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Parts of Europe they only had advertisements between shows, without any breaks in the middle.
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I don't mind paying for an ad-free YouTube experience, but I want to use my own client with SponsorBlock and DeArrow.
If they allowed that I'd be fine with it.
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Why should i pay for premium censorship of my comments ?
Re:Honestly, I am fine with this. (Score:5, Insightful)
If youtube / google were a tiny little mom n' pop, I might feel slightly sympathetic.
But they're not.
Google, and Youtube, are juggernauts of the the online world, gate-keeping and marshalling content in accordance to the wishes in those in Washington, DC.
They are, in effect, the Ministry of Love, implementing the talking points and marching orders handed to them by the Ministry of Truth (that'd be the US Gov't)
They also have more money than most countries do.
I have *no* sympathy for Google, Youtube or any Alphabet business.
Use your ad blockers, use your plug-ins, use whatever method you need to deprive every single little red cent you can from these avaricious, agenda-driven assholes.
Not a penny from me to Google, at least not knowingly and willingly.
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Same here. I want anything Google to crash and burn, no matter how much inconvenience that may mean for me.
As for the ads, I'd much rather watch 30 seconds of blank screen than 30 seconds of a blaring ad. But so far AdBlock has been doing a good job.
youtubewas so 20 years ago. (Score:2)
I only go there to pirate music anyway.
4k youtube downloader FTW
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I literally haven't pirated a single MP3 in probably more than a decade now.
Spotify changed my life...
Re:Honestly, I am fine with this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. Shoving an unskippable ad in my face with blaring volume levels ISN'T going to sell me any product. Ever.
Especially if it's the same fucking ad, over and over and over, every five minutes or so.
Firefox with extensions is making me see blank screens at the start of videos? I can put up with that. Hopefully google can't tell the difference.
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If youtube / google were a tiny little mom n' pop, I might feel slightly sympathetic.
But they're not.
I'd be a hypocrite if I said I had any qualms about supporting a big evil corporation. A good chunk of my income goes to companies I'd rather not do business with if given the choice.
Nah, my problem with YouTube is that it spawned extremely annoying internet celebrities like MrBeast. For that reason alone, YouTube is not getting a cent from me.
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> If youtube / google were a tiny little mom n' pop, I might feel slightly sympathetic.
Stealing from large companies is A-OK?
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Vigilante monopoly-busting!
Re:Honestly, I am fine with this. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Honestly, I am fine with this. (Score:4, Interesting)
It would make sense if thed ads were reasonable. The television grew up into a massive industry with very different ads: curated and infrequent. Now I see ads on youtube every couple of minutes sometimes, long ads that can't be skipped, ads before movie previews (ie, ads before the ads!), etc. What's wrong with youtube going back to the simple concept of skipping after 5 seconds, which seemed to be working and earning money? Why do they have to go to war over this?
Ads on the internet are terrible. They also are an avenue for malware. Probably not on youtube where ads are in the stream, but ads have such a putrid tarnish that nobody should have to apologize for blocking them like we're common criminals.
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Yep. If I were inclined to watch ads in return for content, I still wouldn't because I don't want random shit served to my system. Sites rarely have granular control over what ads are served up, or know anything about the security on the web server sending them.
Re:Honestly, I am fine with this. (Score:5, Insightful)
The television grew up into a massive industry with very different ads: curated and infrequent.
What alternate reality were you watching TV from? TV has always had the most loud, obnoxious ads, and they intentionally interrupted the programming you were watching. Plus, prior to the VCR, they were entirely unskippable.
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OTOH, now that I'm old and decrepit, I almost welcome them, so I can take a bio break.
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You know there's a pause button - you don't have to bio break on their schedule.
That aside though - if you don't wanna watch ads buy Youtube Premium ya cheapskates.
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Now during prime time it's not uncommon for ads to stick around while the show is playing.
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I sort of miss Apple's antediluvian iAd. The ads were present, but were not distracting, nor did they attack privacy, or even be usable as a malware vector. This was a win/win for everyone, as ads got displayed, analytics were obtained, and it didn't just try to subvert someone's browser.
It is a perfect example of enshitification. Cable TV used to have no ads, as people paid for the TV, then ads between shows, then ads throughout, now, especially during sports events or news, there are more ads than prog
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Same reason I no longer go to the movies. Movies used to be preceded by 10 minutes of previews. Now it's literally 45 minutes of "regular" ads like soft drinks and running shoes. No way in hell am I paying $22 for a movie ticket to spend 1/3 of the time in the theater watching the same crap I get on TV.
Re: Honestly, I am fine with this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Youtube can serve me ads when Youtube also takes 100% perpetual responsibility for everything their servers send to my machines.
That includes malware from compromised ads and ad servers.
Oh, they won't do that? They can't guarantee they'll never serve malicious compromised ads, like they have previously? And they won't guarantee to make me whole if they do?
Then I don't give a dry squeaky flying fuck what they whine about. I will protect my devices and my data, and they can suck it.
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I also agree .. mostly. They don't have to send me the video, and I don't have to play the video. But there is a cost to playing the video that is entirely on me. I own the screen that displays it, and I pay to operate that screen. So really, I think they should be paying me real money for the privilege of showing their content on my screens.
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Sure and if my add blocker stops working (It seems to be working fine) I will go somewhere else, and you are always the product irrelevant if you pay or not the will squeeze every last cent they can from you.
Also I would rather see a blank ad than a real ad. If youtube ads where reasonable I wouldn't be blocking then at all but the amount of ads has made it unwatchable.
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If youtube ads where reasonable I wouldn't be blocking then at all but the amount of ads has made it unwatchable.
People have been saying this line for years and its been proven patently false. Adblock Plus has a feature to allow non-intrusive ads. They admit 99.9% of users turn that off too.
"If MP3s were only $1 I would buy them instead of pirating them!" aged like sour milk too.
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And that, in fact, did turn out to be true. Then of course streaming came along. And youtube also does music. I don't know of anyone who pirates mp3s anymore. I wouldn't even know where to go to pirate music.
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I don't have an issue with a site not wanting to serve users at a loss.
I do have an issue when they do that for nearly two decades, destroying every major competitor in the space, and then doing it.
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What is the cost?
Youtube serves "over a billion hours of video daily" for $30B revenue. Say 7c/hr ? People would happily pay that, and surely collecting micro-payments would be a lot easier than managing all that advertising.
But subscription is $14/month in US! so equivalent to 200 average hours of revenue. Not great value for the average person who watches much less than an hour per day.
Content creators get only a fraction of a cent per view, BTW.
Working Great (Score:2)
It works so great I get blank ads and broken videos, and I don't even use an ad blocker.
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Blank screens are infinitely preferrable to the adverts.
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That's fine (Score:5, Insightful)
If my choices are a period of blank screen or ads, gimme the blank screen
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I think I could patch the ad blocker to show some retro screensavers during the blanking phase. Watching flying toasters or little fish in aquarium is easily better than AI generated drivel trying to get me to play some pay-to-win mobile game.
As an adult I feel pretty guilty that I tolerate websites like this showing low quality ads to children all day long. I'd take a 25 minute cartoon trying to sell me Carebears and Transformers over the the 90 second frantic bizarreness that try to get kids hooked on tre
Escalation or error? (Score:2)
I, for one... (Score:2)
...am willing to download the video, including white screen, then edit out said white screen part of the video before I go to the trouble of paying for a subscription to some shitty google service.
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feels like a little bit of javascript could do this in situ.
I use AdblockPlus cranked to "Nuke From Orbit" (Score:3)
It seems to be cat and mouse with Youtube: sometimes I get the "TOS Violation" warning and have to do a page refresh, sometimes the first preroll ad skips but the second one plays or some other brokenness, but I usually don't see ads there either. ABP plugin updates usually fix issues until Youtube catches on, and the cycle repeats. I can't imagine what Youtube's adblock detection code looks like at this point, but I'll bet it's bigger and much grosser than the actual video player.
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And yet, you still sometimes see ads. Adblock Plus is one of the worst of the major adblockers.
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And yet, you still sometimes see ads.
Not often, but yes. As it happens, I work in online video delivery. I can think of a bunch of ways to spoof adblockers that would be super difficult if not impossible to get around. The fact that afaik Youtube etc aren't using these methods tells me adblockers aren't as big of a problem as they suggest.
Adblock Plus is one of the worst of the major adblockers.
By what metric, and with which settings?
Quickstart to Using Privoxy (Score:2)
Is YouTube ... (Score:3, Funny)
Or Pornhub for things like calculus tutorials [pornhub.com] (NSFW).
I can live with this (Score:2)
As long as the "blank" part is silent and there's some indication of how long it will last, I'm good with this.
Competition (Score:2)
I do wish Vimeo didn't pivot away from hosting, or Twitch expanded its hosting focus, or another alternative would pressure YouTube to improve its service instead.
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What happened to Dailymotion?
You won't win (Score:2)
I keep skipping and blocking ads. And I simply can stop showing up if it becomes too difficult for me to work around your ads.
Why wouldn't I watch YouTube's ads like a good little boy? OMG the ads are absolutely terrible. There is no vetting and the bargain basement ad pricing allows for people to canvas YT with low quality content that fish for clicks to scammy drop shipment sites.
Facebook has the same problem with not vetting advertisers and people only have to get burned a few times before we stop spendi
Those are ads? (Score:2)
Those are ads? I thought I was watching short form fly on the wall documentaries about infantilised maniacs living in colourful special accommodation units.
Don't understand the obsession (Score:5, Interesting)
The vast majority of Youtube's viewers put up with ads. I don't pretend to understand why, but they do. Even to watch a tiny short. So the number of people blocking ads is tiny compared to those that just watch them. So why does Youtube have this obsession with forcing ads on the few people who are running ad blockers? It's not like ads are going to get Youtube or the advertisers any revenue from those people. Seems like a spectacular waste of time, money, and effort on Youtube's part. I don't see what they expect to gain from it.
On mobile, I'm stating to use GrayJay. That way I can subscribe to and follow the creators I'm interested in, rather than the services themselves. GrayJay supports Odysee and Nebula, and a significant portion of the content creators I watch are on those platforms now.
As for random youtube videos that I might need to watch for information and tutorials, now I can just ask AI to summarize it for me rather than wade through another tutorial video when plain text would be faster in the first place.
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So why does Youtube have this obsession with forcing ads on the few people who are running ad blockers?
YT no longer growing users, if anything they are losing creators for various reasons (e.g., adpocalypse). So the only way to show growth is to show more ads to existing users. However more ads they push, more people turn to adblockers (and don't ever come back to watching ads). So in hubris they started a multi-front war on Internet, from poisoning browser ecosystem with chromium, to subverting privacy standards, to implementing detection. However, they will inevitably lose, because coders that work there d
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>"So why does Youtube have this obsession with forcing ads on the few people who are running ad blockers?"
Because they are afraid adblockers will catch on for the masses. Ironically, the more they increase the frequency, duration, unskippableness and annoyance of ads, the more they are pushing people to see out ad blockers in the first place.
Re: Don't understand the obsession (Score:2)
Because itâ(TM)s not tiny? 30-50% of internet users use ad blocking software, either as an extension of built into their browser.
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50% of all browser users might use ad block, but most people watch youtube on their phones and smart TVs these days. Youtube has become a form of TV for people. Very few people watch Youtube on a computer screen for entertainment purposes.
Re: Don't understand the obsession (Score:2)
"The vast majority of Youtube's viewers put up with ads. I don't pretend to understand why"
I imagine most people don't use YT enough to be concerned with the ads.
I personally don't feel like I see that many ads. It's not uncommon to go an hour or more without any ads. Depends on the channels you watch. And I'm more than happy to share with creators who are looking to fund their work.
If you're watching the sort of mainstream schlock pushed everyone, I'm guessing you see more ads. Keep in mind, ads are contro
If Baud Street Could Talk (Score:2)
Random Video (Score:3)
Youtube should use it's algorithm to find bad, boring videos that the ad-blocking user most likely doesn't want to see, and serve one of those videos instead. Likewise for video recommendations: recommend random videos unrelated to the user's interests. Perhaps even serve advert videos as the actual content.
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Youtube should use it's algorithm to find bad, boring videos that the ad-blocking user most likely doesn't want to see, and serve one of those videos instead. Likewise for video recommendations: recommend random videos unrelated to the user's interests. Perhaps even serve advert videos as the actual content.
How much personal data do you want YT & Google to know about you? Personal viewing habits, like web search histories, can be psychologically telling about a person. Just ask the FBI.
You do you (Score:2)
Sorry, as usual you go over the top and abuse ads, get greedy and we had enough, so we blocked them.
I agree it's your service, do what you want with it. I have a good set of adblockers and privacy protection that prevents google from yelling about my adblockers. That might change one day, and that's okay.
The reality is, the content level of people just restreaming content but adding their webcam to it isn't quality content. A lot of things are clearly designed in a way that tries to maximize ad revenue etc,
I wouldn't even mind so much, BUT... (Score:2)
YouTube's ad targeting has gotten so bad lately that it's almost comical. I mean... Google has a metric crapton about me. And they supposedly use that data to target me with relevant ads. But that has become one *REALLY* big "supposedly." They're very obviously no longer showing ads based on what I watch or search for. Nor are they using the data they have about me from their other services. If they had been using *ANY* data to target me, I'd be getting ads these days about Adam Savage, Star Trek and
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Yeah. They show me female hygiene products, ads for crap-food I would never eat, etc. It does not get any more irrelevant than what they are currently doing. Until myu ad-blocker (Vivaldi integrated) catches up, I will simply stop watching wherever I get served ads.
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The full-up hilarious inappropriateness of YouTube's ad targeting these days kind of makes me if Google really is using any data about me to target those ads at all, and more than a bit about their overall competence in the first place.
Google is impressively and consistently competent at abusing people and pissing them off. So much so that some of us derive a certain quiet joy and sense of accomplishment from thwarting and undermining their efforts to control and commoditize users.
Re:I wouldn't even mind so much, BUT... (Score:4, Interesting)
Same here. No relevant ad served in a looong time.
However, they have picked up the ideological war. Since my history is off, I can only get a feed with the channels I subscribe to (Home page of You tube returns blank if history is OFF). So far so good.
Once I hit a video from my feed, however, then the videos suggested to play afterwards are not from my feed. This is where, supposedly, the algorithm will serve me something based on, supposedly, the only information they know about me (wink-wink), namely the channels I am subscribed to....So what do I get as suggestions every single time? John Stewart. John Oliver. That's it. Every. Single. Time. Needless to say nothing in my subscription list suggest even slightly that I would want to watch these two...
This is like Google search. Start typing "the" in the search bar and the first suggestion in the auto-complete is The Guardian. Every. Single.Time. Oh, and it is geographically managed too. During my vacations back home these shenanigans are of a different sort with different actors and agendas being pushed. But just as deliberate and politicized. As someone mentioned above these people are state propagandists now (but only for half the state, wink-wink).
They'll just keep making newer, better ad-blockers (Score:2)
Adblocker authors will just keep innovating their products to keep blocking ads anyway, and meanwhile YouTube will keep pissing people off and driving them away -- so the whole thing is counter-productive.
Basing your business strategy on selling ads is stupid.
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Indeed. Until a few weeks ago, I never saw any YouTube ads and that was with Vivaldi browser as it comes out of the box. Now, I see no ads for some creators, black screen for a few seconds with others and ads with a third group. For the third group, I simply close the tab and do not watch their stuff.
I do expect that the Vivaldi team will have this solved in a few weeks though.
I have noticed (Score:2)
My reaction is simple: Try to show me ads, watch me close the browser tab. Some creators get it. Others do not. I am sure they can live without my view. Or not.
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Creators don't always get to decide if YouTube shows you ads, though. Especially for small creators, Google just puts ads before the videos and doesn't compensate the creators.
Downloaders (Score:2)
There's also Invidious, which works most of the time, if you're impatient.
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They will set up a system that uses thousands of transcoders to make temporary versions of streams with todays ads baked in, and a cdn cache to deliver it.
They dont need 100% coverage. If they do it for just the top thousand streams or streamers...
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... They will set up a system that uses thousands of transcoders to make temporary versions of streams with todays ads baked in, and a cdn cache to deliver it. They dont need 100% coverage. If they do it for just the top thousand streams or streamers...
And unless they get a lot more selective about their ads, and unless they find a way to insert the ads without making the actual content come across as gibberish, then those "top thousand" will drop to the "top ten thousand" and then the "top one hundred thousand". They'll be bleeding users faster than they can bring more advertisers on board.
They're in a race to the bottom. I suspect that they realize this, and are trying to Hoover up as much revenue as they can before YouTube ends up being shit-canned t
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yt-dlp is all you need. https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-d... [github.com]
The program even has an update feature with the -u flag.
Good luck with that (Score:2)
"The black screens appear for the length of a typical YouTube pre-roll or ad insert before displaying the actual content of the video the viewer wants to watch."
And it's still better than watching ads.
My guess is that after this is rolled out, it won't be a week before it's circumvented.
The brute force approach works for me (Score:2)
When I don't want to simply open a private window, I jump through a few hoops, and it seems to work for ad avoidance purposes. I don't see ads, and I don't get the black screen. This sounds complicated, but it's very little effort compared to an hours-long session of ad-free Youtube.
The browser I use for Youtube (and almost nothing else) is Pale Moon. Other browsers are probably a bit different, but the steps should be similar.
First, I go to Preferences > Privacy > Exceptions. This opens a long lis
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You might think so, but it's really not. I started looking at the Youtube cookies to see if any of them looked significantly different from the others. The ones I mention did. All of the cookies concerning videos start off "ST-". I figured anything else had to do with getting that stupid "You're using an ad blocker" notice. So I deleted them, and everything was fine...until they came back, which happened quite quickly. So my next step was to stop Youtube from re-installing them, which led me to the "E
Uncle Elon will be happy (Score:2)
Go ahead. Alienate your customers more, and x.com will be happy to provide the free streaming platform the world craves.
Enshitifcation (Score:2)
War on Advertisements == Battle for Consciousness (Score:2)
I have been fighting the battle for my consciousness my entire life and I've waging a war on advertisements on every single front to counteract the Insidious thievery of my mental time at every corner of my being that is exposed to this world and the media within it.
Advertising steals from you, from your mentality, from your consciousness, from your well-being, from your finite most-precious time, from everything that is you. It injects itself like an insidious succubus into your mind and your dreams steali
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All their adblocking on PC is hit or miss. Some days things go through with no delays, no ads. Other days, it puts up big text to turn off adblock and refuses to show anything. Then it's the 60 second ads before the 60 second video... Then it's back to no ads or pauses or anything. It's weird.
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>"All their adblocking on PC is hit or miss. Some days things go through with no delays, no ads. Other days, it puts up big text to turn off adblock and refuses to show anything. Then it's the 60 second ads before the 60 second video... Then it's back to no ads or pauses or anything. It's weird."
Not sure what you mean by "PC", but on my Linux + Firefox + UBlock Origin desktop, I have never had (and still never have had) any ads, blanks, pauses, errors, banners, messages to turn off Adblocking, etc. BUT
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It's been intermittent for me. I use a large number of ad-blockers and I think there's a bit of an arms race going on between the blockers and Google.
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Firefox on Windows with UBlock Origin continues to work just fine for me.