I’m using a stock Samsung Galaxy 8 phone right now (with Android 10) and I disabled the YouTube app. I was basically sick of its s***. Since then, I never sign in to the app/site, and so may aspects of using the site are much better now.
- Everything is faster, since they don’t know me / aren’t tracking as much.
- I always open YT in Firefox Focus, which doesn’t ever keep cookies or history each time I close it, so there’s no history for YT to mine each time I visit again.
- I’m pretty sure I see fewer ads since I don’t have a deep history for YT to mine / target.
- More random suggestions from YT means I am mostly broken out of the bubble caused by their tracking. I find new, interesting music, for instance, now, from the suggestions.
- Hitting “back” in the browser means I go back wherever I was before, not to the YT home page (like the app used to do to me)
I still visit the site often, and appreciate all the good music and channels I watch, but now it’s overall a much more positive experience, more like YT was a few years ago versus the horrible mess it’s become recently.
I’d still appreciate any other tips anyone has for making YT visits even more enjoyable.
Firefox for android supports uBlock which blocks all youtube add btw. I’ve been using the website as my YouTube client for nearly a year now
A Firefox install without uBlock is half baked. Also, Firefox Preview let’s you use any addon, including Sponserblock.
any addon? like ones usually only on PC? 🥺
My Firefox for Android crashes about every 3rd time I open a YouTube video full screen. It finally got so bad that I installed Newpipe.
I’ve had some weirdness with youtube in the past too. For a few weeks firefox would refuse to go into landscape when i opened videos in fullscreen. Kinda cursed
I think Google intentionally breaks it on Firefox, but it’s just a suspicion, I don’t have any proof.
Yeah it doesn’t work in my browser but I just use revanced if I want to do YouTube