These ad-block extensions may be the reason why YouTube is slow on your PC

The publication confirmed that after they installed AdBlock and Adblock Plus, two popular ad-block extensions made by the same developer, YouTube was loading slowly on Chrome. While some thought their internet connection was at play, others thought the browser had a memory leak problem.

However, after uninstalling the popular ad-block solutions, YouTube started working normally, indicating that the problem lay with the extensions themselves and had nothing to do with Google’s crackdown on ad blockers. Google then told Android Central that the loading delay had nothing to do with its crackdown on ad blockers.

There is a lot of chatter in the last days about how Youtube is slow with content blockers.

Those performance issues affect only the latest version of both Adblock Plus (3.22) & AdBlock (5.17), and afflict more than just Youtube.

uBO is *not* affected.https://t.co/O3g48d2DT9

— R. Hill (@gorhill) January 13, 2024

A post on X by Raymond Hill, a developer of another popular ad block solution suggested that the problem affected only the latest version of AdBlock and Adblock Plus and that other extensions remain unaffected. He also claimed that the performance issues are not limited to YouTube but might affect other websites as well.

But disabling these extensions might not be enough the fix the performance issues. Hill says that users will need to reload the web pages a couple of times or open them in a new tab for these extensions to be disabled completely.

In November last year, YouTube started cracking down on ad-blocking extensions, with the video-sharing platform showing multiple with a text saying ‘Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube’ and asking them to disable these extensions if they wanted to continue watching videos.