It's not just you: YouTube is slowing down your PC if you have AdBlock installed by making your CPU sweat, likely as part of its draconian war on ad blockers
In the latest wave of anti-ad blocker measures implemented by YouTube, AdBlock users have been reporting widespread performance issues with the extension enabled.
In a thread posted to the YouTube subreddit over the weekend (thanks, 9to5Google) users noted that having AdBlock enabled caused slow load times and increased CPU usage, as one user writes: «This messes up the resources on the computer as a whole. It just kills chrome it seems.»
I decided to test this myself, and I noticed that having YouTube open with AdBlock increased my rig's CPU usage by around 17%. While using AdBlock or similar programs is against the website's terms of service, AdBlock is also a massively popular extension. On the Chrome web store it boasts 60 million users.
While you do agree to YouTube's terms of service upon using the site, there's a massive difference between simply blocking AdBlock users and causing increased CPU usage. From what I could see the increase was pretty consistent—so not a dangerous spike—but lower-end laptops mainly used for browsing could start having heat problems. At best it's inconvenient and annoying. It should be noted that this CPU-spiking (if deliberate) isn't something YouTube informs AdBlock users of either.
This has led to troubleshooting paranoia, as sudden and unexplained performance dips can be a sign of hardware problems. User JotaroKujoxXx says they were «wondering why my laptop ran like a fucking jet for the last few days», while another commenter replies: «Yeah I've been deleting shit randomly thinking it was my storage space problem.»
The slow-down also appears to be impacting users who are subscribed to YouTube Premium while using AdBlocker for other websites, which is a problem—seeing as a
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