YouTube Ad Skipper

This is a Mozilla Firefox Add-On Accelerating and Skipping YouTube Ads in Two Seconds or Less.

• Real-time Acceleration: Ads are sped up on the fly.
• Auto-Skip: Bypass ads as soon as they become skippable.

How it Works

A process, running when the current tab is youtube.com/watch, periodically checks the page content for ads. If there is one, the process mutes, hides and accelerates it. As soon as the Skip Ads -> button shows up, the process clicks it. When the ad is skipped, the process increments a local private counter of skipped ads in the browser.

Privacy and Security

• It does not make any other changes to the page.
• It does not collect any data.
• It does not store or retrieve any cookies.
• It stores the number of ads skipped in the local storage, which can only be read by the browser (this information is not accessible to anyone / anything else).

Demo

Note: Some ads in this demo are skipped so fast that it's difficult to notice them.

Statistics

Users	Stars	Reviews
3,688	Rated 4.3 out of 5	23

Installation

Install the extension

• at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube_adblock,
• or go to Add-ons and search for Youtube AdBlock accelerates.

Once installed, the extension will automatically and seamlessly take care of ads on YouTube.

Usage

The ads are sped up by 5x for a few seconds, to evade YouTube's control, then it is boosted to 100x. Since this playback rate can cause issues or be too little for some users, this configuration is adjustable in the extension's settings (click on the extension's icon in the browser's toolbar).

Development

Prerequisites

• Mozilla Firefox
• Node.js: 20.9.0
• npm: 10.1.0
• web-ext: 7.8.0

Other versions might work, but have not been tested.

Installation

1. Clone the repo

   git clone [email protected]:MartinBraquet/youtube-adblock.git

2. Install the prerequisites

   For Debian-based distributions:

   Install Node.js from these instructions.

   sudo apt install npm
   sudo npm install --global web-ext
   sudo npm install mustache jsdom

3. Run the extension

   web-ext run

Debugging

1. Open the browser console

   Ctrl + Shift + I

   Or about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox and click on Inspect to open the extension console.

Build

1. Build the extension

   web-ext build --overwrite-dest --ignore-files demo martin readme package-lock.json release.sh

2. The extension is now available in the web-ext-artifacts folder as a .zip file.

Release

Submit the .zip file to Mozilla for review and publication.

Issue / Bug Report

Please open an issue.

Upgrades / Fixes

Please open a pull request.

Disclaimer

This extension is not affiliated with YouTube or Google in any way.

This repo has not been tested on any other browser than Mozilla Firefox.