That's a separate issue. The bugs on AdBlock And AdBlock Plus extensions affect not only YouTube but other websites as well (as said by uBO dev). This isn't on google but the extensions themselves.
Idk, I don't use ublock but ever since this last wave of allegations of throttling adblock users I've been getting videos just refusing to load any of the beginning of the vid after the first couple seconds. It'll play the last 3/4ths though.
I don't remember the exact name of my adblock but it's not ublock origin
YouTube is already a sedated, anaemic whale of a website. Adblock probably makes it run faster, given it usually removes stuff rather than add it. If you want speed, I recommend a frontend such as Invidious or Piped, it's what I use on my weaker laptops where YouTube takes half a minute to load.
Invidious has a bug where it doesn't update as frequently as it's supposed to. I've had this issue on both my self hosted and public instances. I'm thinking about switching to freetube. Always hear about it but never tried it
Sadly it works for YouTube. Yesterday I noticed a friend disabled uBlock Origin on YouTube. They don't care that there's workarounds, they'd rather watch 2 min ads than read up about something they are not interested in.
Did you tell your friend ads waste far more time than the 3-5 second delay you get on Firefox with ublock? I mean, I get someone would hesitate to install another extension like User-Agent Switcher because you don't really want to trust it, but even then just using ublock is still faster than watching ads.
If I spend half an hour to find an implement a workaround (because finding ways around YT's advertising is not my hobby) then I'd have to watch 60 unskippable 30 second ads to break even, every single time they upgrade their cat-and-mouse. I don't watch that much youtube in a month, probably not in 3 months.
I have firefox and ublock and they're not always working, so I just open the video url in any video player that supports it. In potplayer I just copy the video url and use ctrl+v in the main video window and it opens with no issues.
I use Baking Soda and Vinegar to convert all videos in Safari (macOS and iOS) to the native video player. Automatically selects the highest quality video available and skips ads.
Unpopular opinion but.......who fucking cares? Youtube with ublock origin takes like 3 extra fucking seconds to load. 3 second delay is still worlds better than a 30+ second unskippable add. It's not a big deal..