Youtube let the other shoe drop in their end-stage enshittification this week. Last month, they required you to turn on Youtube History to view the feed of youtube videos recommendations. That seems reasonable, so I did it. But I delete my history every 1 week instead of every 3 months. So they don't get much from my choices. It still did a pretty good job of showing me stuff I was interested in watching.
Then on Oct 1, they threw up a "You're using an Ad Blocker" overlay on videos. I'd use my trusty Overlay Remover plugin to remove the annoying javascript graphic and watch what I wanted. I didn't have to click the X to dismiss the obnoxious page.
Last week, they started placing a timer with the X so you had to wait 5 seconds for the X to appear so you could dismiss blocking graphic.
Today, there was a new graphic. It allowed you to view three videos before you had to turn off your Ad Blocker. I viewed a video 3 times just to see what happens.
Now all I see is this.
Google has out and out made it a violation of their ToS to have an ad blocker to view Youtube. Or you can pay them $$$.
I ban such sites from my systems by replacing their DNS name in my hosts file routed to 127.0.0.1 which means I can't view the site. I have quite a few banned sites now.
Firefox + ublock origin is the way forward.
However, as a teacher, my school IT system default browser is chrome, and adverts on YT videos when you're trying to teach a lesson can really suck all the momentum and attention from the class.
Chrome allows you to save javascript as a bookmark URL called bookmarklets. I'm not so clued up on java, but I found this code that zips through the adverts super quickly. Someone can probably improve on this;
for future reference, this is javascript, not java. totally different language
Ah thanks, like I said, I don't really know what I'm talking about! Good to know.
And here's the improved version!
Champ, I knew someone here would be able to improve on it!
That's ridiculous.
The browser that's downloaded by default should be the one that most people want to use and/or have a feature that's necessary for their job.
Personally, I would just deploy both Chrome and Firefox since there is no real reason not to, except it's a little bit more work.
Sadly, that is the case for many companies. They do this because they either leverage the Google Chrome enterprise .admx on Windows or because they rely on Google Workspace which has tight integration with the Chrome browser.
That is unfortunately the same in my case, however, I as a SysAdmin had fought tooth and nail to allow users to choose whichever browser they want and because we have a lot of devs/power users our Firefox usage is 25% on Mac and 17% on Windows. The rest I guess are just marketing :)
Firefox actually has GPO templates (since 2018, starting with Firefox 60 and 61): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customizing-firefox-using-group-policy-windows
I believe Firefox didn't have an MSI installer before, which might have helped Chrome since MSI files are easier to deploy.
Also Chrome is just what most users are familiar with, so just deploying Chrome is not unusual.
I'm not in the US, it's a local council/regional thing. And most areas here have chromebooks for every student so that's just become the default, I think. But yes, our IT tends to be a good 10-15 years behind the curve anyway. No money for resources either.