MartinBraquet / youtube-adblock

Mozilla Firefox Add-On Accelerating and Skipping YouTube Ads in Less Than a Second

YouTube Ad Skipper

This is a Mozilla Firefox Add-On Accelerating and Skipping YouTube Ads in Less Than a Second.

• Real-time Acceleration: Ads are sped up on the fly.
• Auto-Skip: Bypass ads as soon as they become skippable.

How it Works

A process, running when the current tab is youtube.com/watch, periodically checks the page content for ads. If there is one, the process accelerates it by setting the playback rate to 1000. As soon as the Skip Ads -> button shows up, the process clicks it. When the ad is skipped, the process increments a local private counter of skipped ads in the browser.

Privacy and Security

• It does not make any other changes to the page.
• It does not collect any data.
• It does not store or retrieve any cookies.
• It stores the number of ads skipped in the local storage, which can only be read by the browser (this information is not accessible to anyone / anything else).

Demo

Note: Some ads in this demo are skipped so fast that it's difficult to notice them.

Statistics

Users	Stars	Reviews
3,605	Rated 4.3 out of 5	18

Installation

Install the extension

• at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube_adblock,
• or go to Add-ons and search for Youtube AdBlock accelerates.

Once installed, the extension will automatically and seamlessly take care of ads on YouTube.

Development

Prerequisites

• Mozilla Firefox
• Node.js: 20.9.0
• npm: 10.1.0
• web-ext: 7.8.0

Other versions might work, but have not been tested.

Installation

1. Clone the repo

   git clone [e-mail]:MartinBraquet/youtube-adblock.git

2. Install the prerequisites

   For Debian-based distributions:

   Install Node.js from these instructions.

   sudo apt install npm
   sudo npm install --global web-ext
   sudo npm install mustache jsdom

3. Run the extension

   web-ext run

Debugging

1. Open the browser console

   Ctrl + Shift + I

   Or about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox and click on Inspect to open the extension console.

Build

1. Build the extension

   web-ext build --overwrite-dest --ignore-files demo martin readme package-lock.json

2. The extension is now available in the web-ext-artifacts folder as a .zip file.

Release

Submit the .zip file to Mozilla for review and publication.

Issue / Bug Report

Please open an issue.

Upgrades / Fixes

Please open a pull request.

Disclaimer

This extension is not affiliated with YouTube or Google in any way.

This repo has not been tested on any other browser than Mozilla Firefox.