It's not just you: YouTube is slowing down your PC if you have AdBlock installed by making your CPU sweat, likely as part of its draconian war on ad blockerst.co/1npHLw8F9r.
— EndGameWW3 🇺🇸 (@EndGameWW3) January 15, 2024
AdBlock users have been reporting widespread performance issues with the extension enabled on YouTube, and while suspicion justifiably fell on YouTube’s head, the problem may not lie in the platform itself.
In a thread posted to the YouTube subreddit over the weekend (thanks, 9to5Google) users noted that having AdBlock enabled caused slow load times and increased CPU usage, as one user writes: “This messes up the resources on the computer as a whole. It just kills chrome it seems.”
I decided to test this myself, and I noticed that having YouTube open with AdBlock increased my rig’s CPU usage by around 17%. While using AdBlock or similar programs is against the website’s terms of service, AdBlock is also a massively popular extension. On the Chrome web store it boasts 60 million users.