Mashable reports that users ran into a black screen on YouTube, and that it stayed for about 6 seconds before the video began playing. The reports indicate it affected several browsers including Firefox, Edge, Vivaldi.
Some users joked that they would rather see a black screen than an ad. While that’s certainly a better experience, it does waste precious seconds of our time. A simple workaround for the black screen on YouTube is to just refresh the page, hit F5 as soon as the page starts loading. uBlock Origin’s filters were updated with a patch to resolve the problem, the add-on updates its filters automatically. If you are still experiencing the black screen issue, just open the extension’s dashboard and manually update the filters. This tug-of-war is getting annoying, but it appears to me that Google’s efforts are actively promoting the use of ad blockers, instead of attracting new subscribers.
NewPipe had to update a couple of times in the past month because YouTube made changes that broke the 3rd party playback. First time it took a few days, but so far it seems they’ve been able to keep up with YouTube’s bs.
I worry for a day when YouTube figures out how to make ads an unskippable part of the video itself so that they’re present with or without adblock, while also maintaining the ability to update them as needed.
Even if they fully render them into the video with absolutely no way for an extension to tell where it is something like Sponsorblock where people manually enter time codes could still get around it.