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I'm still unable to accept that people accept ads as a part of life. I can't use instagram it's full of ads. I did finally get YT premium convinced by people on here but UBO all the way. Thankfully I never got sucked into Twitch.

I get it too I'm a bad person for not accepting articles where every other paragraph is an ad.

There was a Firefox extension long ago that did NOT block ads but hid them. Basically it loaded them and for all the site knew, the add was showing, so it was transparent.

But, the ad wasn't rendering in the page. So the user didnt need to suffer them, but the website owners still profited.

The only losers where ad buyers, who IMHO are exactly the ones that should be affected.until they realize that ads are not effective.

Someone should bring something like that for current platforms. Even for video like, a placeholder video with a tip, interesting fact or whatever, playing while the page load the real video.

Youtube is still very much ad spam even if you block the ads.

Of course it depends on what kind of videos you watch. But videos themselves are becoming more ad filled and lower effort for me.

I mainly consume software, gaming, cooking and hardware news videos.

Huge portion of human effort going to ads is really sad

My 2.5 year old recognizes ads and says “ew, ads” because I’ve intentionally said it each time we see one.
The people who "accept ads as a part of life" are funding the content you read and watch. You are not in any way "a bad person", but you should be thankful that not everyone blocks ads.
I am just today experience an issue where the volume is reset 100% for each ad. Ads play, I turn volume down to 8%, I have the tab still on display (though I have focus on a separate window), and when the 1st ad ends, the 2nd ad is as loud as 100% even though the slider remains at 8%. Click to reset it to 8%, then 3rd ad plays at 100%.
Not sure if this applies, but might be worth consideration

https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/10/06/no-more-loud-commercials-g...

I noticed during the olympics that they would hide the in-page volume controls during commercials. I hadn't seen that before. Fortunately it's still possible to mute via the tab control.
Drink verification can to continue
That was my immediate reaction too. Can't believe how prescient a 4chan post about a doritos munching neckbeard was

13 years ago. For those not in the loop:

https://imgur.com/please-drink-verification-can-dgGvgKF

It’s getting more invasive. Drink the damn can.
I was thinking the same thing lmao
I think it was the MPAA that tried to develop DVD players with cameras so they could count room occupancy and lock the content if you were tying to exceed the terms of their license.
Was it Sony that had the patent on a device that would require the watcher to say the product name out loud to the microphone to continue watching? The product to my knowledge doesn't exist but the patent for it did.
Please drink verification can.

(This never happened though. The MPAA did a lot of shady things with DRM, but not this.)

I believe this was a Microsoft patent related to the kinect.
This is related but also kinda an aside: has anyone been able to find a solid, reliable ad blocker for Twitch?

Brave use to block it for a while by default (it does great on YouTube ads).

There also use to be a ping pong between Twitch and some chrome extensions which worked temporarily and then Twitch broke a week later.

The best I've been able to find is Alternate Player for Twitch.tv which does hide the ads (essentially freezing the stream while they play), but I have been unable to keep the stream playing ad free for quite some time.

Firefox, uBlock Origin, then follow the linked section of the Twitch Ad Solutions GH. This has worked for me for a very long time. Use the VAFT script. https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions?tab=readme-ov...
> The best I've been able to find is Alternate Player for Twitch.tv which does hide the ads (essentially freezing the stream while they play), but I have been unable to keep the stream playing ad free for quite some time.

This is not my experience. Alternate Player for Twitch.tv essentially ignores twitch ads for me. Using Brave, not sure if this is relevant.

Twitch has been speedrunning their own demise. Maybe the people on charge have personally invested heavily in Kick?
When it stopped being about people playing games and became discount reality TV, it's death nell was rung.
> Maybe the people on charge have personally invested heavily in Kick?

Twitch is owned by Amazon. AWS sells the streaming tech Twitch uses to Kick.

Amazon would probably rather sell IVS to Kick than try and figure out how to make Twitch profitable. Or the just don't care enough to notice the people at Twitch are just LARPing at business.

I think fundamental truth is that live streaming live content was never financially great business. Most popular creators could make it out, but platforms have heavy costs.
It’s owned by Amazon, a publicly traded company. They squeeze as hard as they can, and then some to hit those quarterly numbers.
> Avoid minimizing or muting Twitch for a better experience.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression that it's not possible for javascript to detect that you've muted the browser tab itself, at least. Doesn't solve the problem of them checking whether you have the tab focused, of course, but it should be mutable.

I suspect this is one of the less nefarious reasons age verification is getting pushed so hard. 2026: you need a webcam to prove your age. 2030: we know you have a webcam because you verified your age. It must be left on with echo cancellation and background noise suppression disabled so we can hear the ad we are playing.

<insert obvious ways in which this will be misused here>

Why does the Window Manager have to provide focus and even visibility info to the application? I could foresee an evolution of runtime controls where "Is Focused" is a user-selectable permission for apps, just like how the browser requires user approval to allow web notifications or PeerConnection access to network or webcams.
I think this case was the browser was active, but not the tab, so the browser reports that.

Many, many telemetry metrics have been added in the name of power and efficiency. If a page refreshes every 30 seconds, is it still worthwhile doing it when the tab isn’t active? It would be better to wait until the tab is active again, then refresh immediately.

That being said, all of these capabilities are a privacy nightmare, only increasing the precision of browser fingerprinting and user monitoring. Firefox could have taken a stance on refusing to implement them, but I don’t think it has an easy opt out.

Because it's pretty useful, for example to avoid refreshing data if the tab is unfocused and refresh immediately on focus.
Long ad breaks were real annoying on Twitch, I try to watch the same streamers on YouTube now if possible, since I have a YouTube family subscription (seems like avoiding ads on Twitch requires a subscription to each streamer?).

That YouTube is much better technically (e.g. immediate rewinding) is also a nice bonus.

Edit: I'm seeing now that there's something called Twitch Turbo for $12/month to avoid ads, though YT premium family still seems like a better deal as long as you have 2+ people for it, since you also get a YouTube music sub and, y'know, no ads on the rest of YouTube proper.

In addition to what Twitch is doing, a banner popped up in the Android YouTube app stating that you need to upgrade to Premium to be able to "Jump Ahead to parts other users think are valuable". Different from skipping 10 seconds at a time, but there's a non-zero chance that'll be pay-walled too.

It'll only be a matter of time until you can't do anything but watch whatever content Google has curated for you, with no chance to adjust anything at all.

"for a better experience"

Do people writing this type of copy actually believe this?

This is something that browsers should solve.
vaft with uBlock Origin works perfectly https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions
In some way it’s a feature, leaves more room for products that are more user friendly. Of course overall it's still bad; this framing gives me some hope at least.
Just think. No matter how bad a day you're having at the office, somebody had to come to work and implement this.
Maybe Spotify didn't do this first but they're the ones I blame. They pause an ad while the output is muted.
When those commercials start playing at the gas pump I instinctively turn away out of sheer principal.
Is there an about:config setting to disallow JavaScript access to tabs?
so basically a more upbeat version of that Black Mirror episode?
> claude fork chromium, remove the api so it knows if the tab is open, always return true, compile it and replace my current chrome with it
That was a black mirror episode.
Friendly reminder to use a browser you can disable the active tab apis in, IronFox / LibreWolf are both great (Mobile / Desktop), Firefox if you value convenience the most.
This is nothing. Wait until you see what the eye-tracking technology Amazon has been developing for their workers could be used for.
It's like someone saw an episode of Black Mirror and Idiocracy and went, "That's it! That's what we need to do!" and began using them as a playbook.

Yeah, I'm sure this won't drive massive adoption of ad blockers or anything.