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.
Use Altstore and sideload uYouPlus
This is the best an iOS user can do I think. Does Firefox exist in App Store? If yes, if it doesn’t use Safari as base, it might be supporting extensions. Never had an iPhone so don’t know much about it.
Slightly better, instead of Altstore get your device registered on the apple developer program (there are cheap ways of doing this) then you can sign as many sideloaded apps as you want and they stay working without having to constantly connect altserver.
It uses Safari as a base, for now. Hoping that with the EU forcing other app stores or sideloading we get full Firefox on iOS. Would be amazing.
I remember seeing something saying they were testing a full build for iOS a while back. They essentially have one feature complete with the macOS Apple Silicon version as well.