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On 02/12/2020 12:34, Neil wrote:
Sorry, I know this is a bit off topic .......Recently when using Youtube I keep getting requests to log in to my google account. I don't have one, and do not intend to ever have one. As for google mail, the less said the better.It seems that the time is coming when I will not be able to look at anything on Youtube without signing in. Is that correct. If so my response is that I won't bother with Youtube any more.Or is there a better way? I have done some research already, and as usual am getting more and more confused, and angry,
Wow you seem to give up on things really easily these days chief... there's always a way to hack around these things, you should know that by now.
Disclaimer: I absolutely love youtube. Not the actual site obviously, or it's corporate owners, or their crappy stewardship, the adverts, commentards or any of that awful crap. It's the content I'm after, which is invaluable. As such, I'm willing to jump through a lot more hoops to continue to access that sweet sweet youtube data *on my terms* so this is how I do it.
I won't bother with the details but my entire home is hooked up with a network based multimedia system (obviously). A critical part of this is Kodis driving screens all over the place: the TV in the lounge and spare monitor in my workspace are the most used. I use the Kodi YouTube addon to seamlessly blend in my customised YouTube subscriptions/feeds/watch queues/etc with all the rest of my media library so in practice YouTube effectively IS just a TV channel like any other. Which is exactly how I want it, because I often get through 5-6 hours plus of YouTube per day (seriously!) so it has to be effortless and hassle free to use.
That's how important zero-annoyance YouTube is for me - I take my casual entertainment very seriously and won't stand for adverts, interstitial breaks, pop-ups, cookies warnings or any other stupid Google crap in just the same way I timeshift, advert strip and otherwise de-annoy the rest of my media flow.
An important part of my media flow is using a modified variant of the Chromium browser to do the distasteful Google login side of things - I use this to test 4K webrender youtube vs Firefox and because I need to occasionally login to the special Google account I created just to run my YouTube stuff in order to add more fuel to my subscribed list, watch later queues, etc. I want to keep this away from my Firefox instance.
This finally brings me to the relevant bit - nothing above is really useful to you at all, I just use it as an illustration of how awesome a resource YouTube can be if you A: like it as much as my household does and B: can be bothered going to the (relatively minimal) effort required to force it to behave itself.
So, as you've all noticed, for unknown reasons (but presumably part of a wider EU lobbying campaign for something) Google have recently fiddled with YouTube and their general session cookies/interstitial popups to make using any of their web properties massively more annoying. YouTube constantly pauses and harasses you with signin prompts (and now somehow has even more shitty adverts... apparently), Google search is unusable without triggering cookie acceptances, etc, etc. Very annoying indeed.
Although I have this big complicated Kodi/Chromium YouTube setup running that requires an account to work properly, I actually browse for random content, follow random internet links to videos and generally interact with YouTube more regularly on my standard 24/7 browser which is of course Firefox. I do NOT sign in to any Google property whatsoever on this browser, which seems to be how most of you are using YouTube (the normal way, basically). In the last month I've had to adjust Firefox a couple of times to deal with Google's shenanigans to keep things as I want them: for *reasons*, I specifically do not want Google cross-tracking and tying together my casual anonymous YouTube browsing via Firefox with my "official" logged-in media centre Kodi-based habits because I don't want the machine learning algorithms polluting one feed with the other in an attempt to be 'clever'.
This is how I keep my Firefox YouTube setup running hassle-free, not logged in, advert-free and with no damn harassment:
You will need the following addons: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/privacy-badger17/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/enhancer-for-youtube/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-about-cookies/You may, but perhaps won't, need these as well - you should have them anyway though to be honest. I certainly use them personally and they may well be critical for my process to work. I'm not going to disable them to find out ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/cookie-quick-manager/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/temporary-containers/Install all of them - specifically setup the two container tools (which I noticed Eion also recommended) as they are indispensable. You want them setup in automatic mode so every new Firefox tab is generated in it's own containerized process and destroyed immediately afterwards rendering cross-tab communication impossible (you really need this in 2020 just for general use). I have setup a specific YouTube container that catches any matching URL and contextualizes it in the same container namespace for me so I can keep an eye on it. Use the built in Firefox mechanisms and the cookie manager addon to enforce rigorous deletion of ALL cookies from all sources all of the time the moment the container is closed - optionally (and more advanced) you can use the cookie manager and/or the container isolation plugins to "pin" or recreate on demand certain cookies between sessions or recreate valid session cookies on namespace initialisation. Generally speaking you don't need to worry about that - if you're the sort of person who needs that stuff then you'll already know about it I guess.
The "I Don't Care About Cookies" plugin will take care of the vast majority of stupid Google (and everyone elses to be fair) GDPR style cookie pop-ups in one swoop. It's a very blunt tool but works great in containerised browsers because you don't care about anything in your soon to be destroyed isolated container anyway and the cookie tools from above simply delete everything moments after it's arrived. Which means if you watch your developer console whilst loading pages you'll see this constant dance of cookies coming in, being automatically accepted and then instantly destroyed again. Ridiculous, but that's what the internet of 2020 has come to it seems.
The final annoyance to purge is all those damn interstitial pop-ups and pauses YouTube now barrage you with. Use the YouTube Enhancer and SponsorBlock to fiddle with some obvious settings to make life easier - they handle things like auto-returning focus to the video after the countless interruptions for a seamless experience.
It took me a bit of fiddling to arrive at the correct invocation but the final piece of the puzzle is to add some custom block rules to Ublock to handle Google's crap. Open Ublock settings > My Filters and copy/paste this to the end:
! 2020-11-18 youtube still being an arseyoutube.com##+js(set, ytInitialPlayerResponse.auxiliaryUi.messageRenderers.upsellDialogRenderer.isVisible, false) youtube.com##+js(set, ytInitialData.topbar.desktopTopbarRenderer.interstitial.consentBumpRenderer.forceConsent, false)
youtube.com###dialog www.youtube.com##.openedyoutube.com##.ytd-popup-container.style-scope > .ytd-popup-container.style-scope youtube.com##.yt-formatted-string:has-text(• Subscribe to your favourite channels):upward(5)
youtube.com##.ytd-consent-bump-lightbox youtube.com##ytd-popup-container youtube.com###consent-bump !||consent.google.com^ !google.*##+js(aeld, DOMContentLoaded, CONSENT)Bit of a mess but extensively tested and as you can see, I last modified the custom filters back on 2020-11-18 and since then haven't had to adjust them again. The bottom two lines are commented out as they initially worked but then broke something.
I'm aware that I probably haven't made this look particularly straight forward or easy - but it really is. Just install some addons (most of which you should already have anyway), do their basic first-run configs and check a couple of minor settings. Add the custom filters to Ublock and you're back to enjoying YouTube completely ad, hassle, tracking and interruption free. I'm doing this through a VPN for hours a day with no login without any problems and have fiddled with many other people's setups in the last couple of weeks so they can continue doing the same.
YouTube is so awesome I'm categorically not willing to go without it: I just wish Google wouldn't be such raging dicks about things sometimes.
On mobile devices - Android at least - there is an even easier one-shot solution. Just install Vanced and that's it - Vanced will replace your standard YouTube app and block basically everything for you with no extra config. Works even better if combined with root and a system level adblocker.
https://vancedapp.com/ Any questions, just ask. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG https://mailman.dcglug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq