Error reports for www.youtube.com

[ghostwords]

We are getting lots of error reports for www.youtube.com; it's our most-reported-on domain for the latest Privacy Badger (version 2017.7.24).

Here is some of what our users say:

video won't load

Youtube video shows: 'Request blocked by extension'. Fixed by switching on s0.2mdn.net

video said an extension blocked requests to the server

Videos laden anfangs nicht - Meldung "Anfragen an den Server wurden durch Erweiterung blockiert"

Ads don't appear instead it says an extension is blocking the ad content. Ad blocks still appear just without the actual ad.

preroll Advertisement on Youtube "blocked by an extension".

[terrorist96]

Can't say I've had any of these issues. Don't even see s0.2mdn.net on youtube, but I have noticed it breaking things on other sites (see #1236)

[terrorist96]

Can't reproduce on FF either, even when toggling other extensions. Though my FF profile is rarely used so my PB isn't as learned as my Chrome profile (and I can't import my Chrome data into FF cuz the new update hasn't been pushed out yet, so #1318 is still broken).

[cowlicks]

I also have been unable to reproduce this. Hopefully fixing #1475 will help this.

[ghostwords]

Since last August (2017-08), reports have somewhat fallen in frequency for the www.youtube.com FQDN, but this still seems like a big problem:

+---------+-------+
| ym      | count |
+---------+-------+
| 2017-12 |    91 |
| 2017-11 |   158 |
| 2017-10 |   173 |
| 2017-09 |   236 |
| 2017-08 |   305 |
| 2017-07 |   139 |
| 2017-06 |    54 |
| 2017-05 |    57 |
| 2017-04 |    68 |
| 2017-03 |    71 |
| 2017-02 |    67 |
| 2017-01 |    72 |
...

Some recent messages from reports

Not able to watch YouTube videos, only sound works. No picture.

Video plays with only audio and black screen

Visiting certain channels frequently results in video playback that appears to be audio only. Might be related to preroll advertisements. AdBlock handles them okay.

With Badger enabled, YouTube's player doesn't "remember" my volume setting and is always on the highest volume when opening a new video.

"requests to server...."
video goes to gray box with above text

I get the following error on all YouTube videos: "Requests to the server have been blocked by an extension." The videos eventually work, but it takes several minutes, and this extension is the only one I have that blocks anything. Thanks!

Video won't play

Youtube autoplay (where it loads the next video after the current video has finished) is broken. Using Privacy badger with uBlock, Ghostery, DuckDuckGo and HTTPS: Everywhere. Using firefox 57.0.3 (64-bit) on windows 10.

videos no longer load, refresh 2-3 times before video plays, and droped video quality to make it load faster

Videos laden nicht mehr.

no images are loading

Video not loading

video not playing

Sound for the video was not working until I disabled privacy badger for the site.

video not playing

[ghostwords]

Similar messages seem to be coming from both Firefox and Chrome browsers. Most messages are from Windows users, but this may just be because most Privacy Badger users are on Windows.

[ghostwords]

The error rate remains consistent and high. However, I think this is mostly a case of YouTube being a very popular site, YouTube sometimes not working for whatever reason (YT is down, user's Internet is slow, ...), and users blaming Privacy Badger for it.

It's not clear what if anything we should do about it. We might want to show a special message somewhere in the popup just for YouTube where we say something like the following, or maybe better yet update the FAQ with the following and point there:

• Are ads not blocked? Privacy Badger is not actually an ad blocker.
• Yes, there are no third-party trackers on YouTube. The tracking on YouTube is first party and is mostly inseparable from the functionality.
• Is YouTube not working? It's probably not Privacy Badger's fault, but try disabling for YT and if that helps and if re-enabling breaks YT again, please reach out to us directly.