In November, there were conspiracy theories suggesting that Google intentionally slowed down YouTube on Mozilla Firefox, leading to suboptimal viewing experiences for users. Google later clarified that the issue was not specific to Firefox but was related to “installed ad blockers,” affecting various browsers.
Recently, similar complaints surfaced in January, with users reporting slow YouTube performance when using ad blockers. Many users pointed fingers at Google once again. However, it was revealed that the problem was not with YouTube or Google but stemmed from a bug in the recent update (Version 5.17.0) of Adblock and Adblock Plus.
Reddit users brought attention to the issue, and it was determined that users of uBlock Origin did not experience slowdowns. Adblock Plus developers acknowledged the problem, labeling it as a performance regression in the extension engine (Version 1.1.1) that both Adblock Plus and AdBlock had adopted in their recent updates (3.22 and 5.17.0, respectively).
The issue has been resolved with the latest version, 1.1.2, of eyeo’s Web Extension Ad Blocking Toolkit (EWE). The breaking change causing performance regression has been reverted. Users experiencing problems with Adblock and Adblock Plus are advised to update their extensions and avoid running multiple content filters or ad blockers simultaneously to address performance issues.
