Security News > 2024 > January > Latest Adblock update causes massive YouTube performance hit
Adblock and Adblock Plus users report performance issues on YouTube, initially blamed on Google but later determined to be an issue in the popular ad-blocking extension.
BleepingComputer confirmed the issues after installing the Adblock Chrome extension, which caused YouTube to become very slow, making the site hard to navigate and for videos to load very slowly.
An issue opened on the Adblock project's GitLab page suggests that the performance problems are caused by version 1.1.1 of the extension engine, introduced in Adblock version 5.17 and Adblock Plus 3.22, which was released last week.
Using browser profiler tools, he identified that the cause of the severe performance issues was the time consumed by the content script code of Adblock Plus on the YouTube webpage.
Disabling Adblock Plus or Adblock is not enough to resolve the performance issues.
The Adblock developers are aware of the performance issues and are investigating them.