Google has been blocking adblockers, or atleast trying to for some time now. Notably on Youtube.
I barely feel the impact of this because I use Mastodon, Lemmy, Peertube and other services that don’t have ads.
Unlike your traditional website, these services federate, with each other over this Fediverse thing we all know about.
What’s good about this is if, some severs wants to be greedy against it’s users, users can easily just change servers and not have to worry about losing familiarity with the platforms user interfaces that they grew accustomed to.
Legally the largest Mastodon, Peertube servers and other can’t do anything to smaller servers as the software used for the Fediverse platforms, generally are open source and federated with each other with help from activity pub which is also open source.
Just don’t use Google Chrome. I only use it for one system at work and I blame Microsoft for that not working well with Firefox.
Well, you’re right in principle, but with my (old, but current) Mac+Intel configuration Firefox is not as sleek as Chrome and also often Firefox turns the fan on while Chrome doesn’t (it may just be that Google is bricking Firefox when you’re on YouTube, for example)
Anyhow, I’m trying to use Firefox as much as I can (I’ve always done so), but it’s always been true it was a better experience to use Chrome on my setup (and I’ve never used Safari)
Edit: why the downvotes? To teach me a lesson? I said he’s right, but I do have an actual problem and cannot yet make the full move (and am going to check out the suggestions below. Thanks!)
Does this happen on YT? Enable hw acceleration and install enhanced h264ify.
I finally had a minute to try it out and unfortunately it does not seem to change anything on my 2020 Mac+Intel (the GPU load skyrockets when I watch videos on YouTube)
GPU load should increase when watching videos, even if hardware acceleration is enabled. In about:config, set media.hardware-video-decoding.force-enabled as true and restart firefox. Additional stuff may be needed for Mac which I don’t know.
Does it also happen when you change user-agent to chrome? Google has been worsening the experience of their services on non-Chrome browsers for a solid few years now
You could try Librewolf or possibly even Floorp, if baseline firefox doesn’t do it for you.
Have you considered Orion? It has the sleekness of Safari (and based on WebKit) but gives you plug-ins from Chrome and Mozilla. I love it because it doesn’t have the non-native clunkiness of other browsers.
With the fan turning on, unfortunately it’s potentially due to Firefox being a little more resource heavy. Could be Chromium is a bit under the threshold and Firefox is a little over.