The workaround: Switch from Adblock Plus to uBlock Origin.

ABP has had random issues that break it often for years now. It's crap.

DNS does nothing for youtube.

Sure, but what about in 2 years from now?

I used IronFox for a couple years and it suddenly stopped getting updates, and it took me a few months to realize and switch to something else. I don't want that to happen again.

I like the idea of librewolf, especially that it's just a patch set on top of Firefox, but someone needs to maintain that patch set. This would be fine for simpler software, but browsers are complex and I just worry that updates will stall out with little warning.

Tom’s Hardware, Ad Block Plus, paying for YouTube Premium as a “work around”?

Guys this content was by boomers for boomers

This may not get well recieved but yt premium is worth the money imho, but again I dont wanna pay those evil corpos.

Maybe? It's a lot less likely for FF to disappear than LibreWolf.

DNS does nothing for youtube.

Agreed. But it's still too far of a timeframe to be worried about imo

If you want to support a webpage, then donate to it. This ad-based business model should die.

Yeah, perhaps I'll try it out. I've made most of the changes they did in my config though.

Do you use Firefox sync already?

Yup. Switching won't be a big deal.

Librewolf has sync disabled, but if you enable that it's as easy as signing in. If it goes to shit like you're worried about, you still have it syncing

I understand your reasoning, and you're not wrong.

However, the amount that they charge you FAR outweighs the cost of compute, bandwidth and storage. The few tens of GB of bandwidth that you use and the storage costs of the video may cost them $1/user/month or less.

Their costs have been easily covered by ad revenue for decades. This subscription service is only because they've purchased all meaningful competitors and can now turn the screws and juice their customers for more money because they have no other options.

Sure, though they also need to pay people, run the platform, run Youtube music, pay for rights to things, and a bunch of other stuff. I’m not about to say that they aren’t another greedy corporation, that would be crazy, but ya’ll expecting to pay nothing are flatout ridiculous.

Wasn't adblock plus bought by some ad agency? I thought they were long gone...

Guys this content was by boomers for boomers

Tom's Hardware sold out looong ago, sold in 2007 to some faceless consortium. The original "Tom", Thomas Pabst, who is GenX and not a boomer btw, has had nothing to do with the site since.

The editor of this article looks to be a millennial btw.

I'm not worried about data loss. Honestly, the only feature I actually care about from sync is open tabs and recent history, since I'll often open something on one device that I was using on another. I don't really use bookmarks or saved passwords.

My main concern is security. I don't want my machines to be susceptible to malware, and with browsers being very complex, I want to make sure the dev team is very responsive in shipping security updates.

The main reason I use IronFox on my phone is that it works with FDroid, which is important because I don't have Google Play running on my main profile (I use GapheneOS). If the flatpak is updated within a few days of Firefox consistently, that's good enough. But if it takes weeks or more, that's too much.

FreeTube is a FOSS youtube frontend.

FreeTube occasionally has issues on videos with preroll ads where the video fails to play because the ad won't be fetched. This can sometimes be mitigated by running an ipv6 rotator script and blocking freetubes access to ipv4. The one I run reassigns my ipv6 address once every 5 seconds to a new randomly generated valid address.

Sometimes even this doesn't block the ads (again causing the video to fail to play) in which case selecting the share icon from the freetube interface and clicking "open invidious link" will open a web browser pointed to whichever invidious instance is set to your default.

The freetube folks are working on implementing DASH, which should eliminate the need for these workarounds once successful.