YouTube finds a brand new way to bother users of ad blockers

YouTube has seemingly found a new, creative way to discourage users from turning on their ad blockers — and for the first time, it has nothing to do with playback or ads. According to multiple reports, the Google-owned service has stopped showing comments and video descriptions to users with ad blockers enabled in what appears to be a new turn in the long-running war that dates back to 2023.

According to reports we’ve been both receiving from our users and seeing on other platforms such as Reddit, YouTube has been disabling comment sections and video descriptions under all videos for at least some ad-blocking watchers, specifically on PC. It looks like YouTube is testing this approach on a select number of users, so not everyone has been running into it, but enough for the problem to make some waves. So what’s going on and how ad blockers, and specifically AdGuard, will address this?

The exact method of messing with the ad-blocking crowd may be new, but it’s far from the first time when ad blockers faced a challenge from YouTube and managed to successfully overcome it by updating the filter lists — sets of rules that tell the ad blocker what exactly to block. As with previous issues, the fixes have already been deployed. Once the updated filters reach users, the issue should resolve. But not everyone may have received them yet. And that’s where things get different.

The gap between a fix being created and it actually being delivered to users has never been wider — and that’s thanks to Google’s new extension rules. To understand why this delay now matters more than ever, we need to talk about Manifest V3.

Why Manifest V3 plays a big role

Manifest V3, or MV3 for short, is a new extension platform for Google Chrome and other browsers built with the Chromium engine (this includes Edge and Opera, for example). It was first announced back in 2018, iterated over the next few years, and started to roll out to users in 2023. By July 2025, Manifest V2, the old standard, had been fully deprecated, and no browser extensions working with it had remained available in Chrome. But why is this important in our case?

Among all browser extensions affected by MV3, ad blockers, perhaps, were hit the most. MV3 changed a lot in terms of what extensions in Chrome could and could not do, and the scope of their permissions reduced significantly compared to Manifest V2. One of the most significant changes is the replacement of the webRequest API with the declarativeNetRequest API. While both APIs allow extensions to block unwanted content, the declarativeNetRequest API is far more restrictive. It operates by pre-defining a list of rules that the extension can use to block content, and these rules are applied statically. In contrast, the webRequest API allowed extensions to intercept and modify network requests dynamically, offering far greater flexibility. This means that under MV3, ad blockers can no longer respond to requests in real-time, and their ability to update filter lists or adapt to new content is significantly reduced. As a result, blocking certain ads or trackers can become slower and less effective, as the system can’t react to new patterns until the filters are updated through a full extension review process.

This was done to improve users’ privacy, and, to be fair, this goal was achieved — with less permissions, malicious browser extensions now have less possibilities to induce real harm to your browser or system. The other side of the coin, though, is that many extensions, and especially ad blockers, have become less powerful. We had to put in a lot of effort and creativity just to keep the MV3 version of AdGuard Ad Blocker extension at the same level as its MV2 predecessor. But even then, there are more problems that may not be immediately noticeable to an average ad blocker user.

For example, and this is where we’re getting very close to the issue at hand, ad-blocking extensions under MV3 can’t just update their filters at will like before. The filters in MV3 are pre-built within the extension itself, which means that filter updates can only be delivered through full extension updates, and updating the extension requires it to go through a full-scale review process. This means that if something breaks on a popular website (like YouTube), users may be stuck without a solution for days.

There used to be a workaround we came up with, called Quick fixes filter, designed to keep some of the rules on the ‘fast update track.’ But Google shut that possibility up in early 2025 when they prohibited any remote code execution. The intention behind this policy was good — it greatly reduced the risk that a potential attacker could inject malicious scripts or remotely hosted code, but the wording used in the policy was so broad that even ad-blocking rules can fall under these restrictions.

So to keep the users’ filtering rules as fresh as possible, we had to find new ways of delivering filter rule updates to users’ machines, and this is where Chrome’s fast-track review comes into play. It allows developers to update filters more frequently without waiting for a full extension review. However, this method only applies to changes in rules that Google considers ‘safe.’ We roll out automatic extension updates with such rules every few hours. On the other hand, changing any of the rules that don’t fall under this category requires the browser extension to undergo a full review process, which can take a long time — up to a week, or even more in some cases. Unfortunately, the fixes required to deal with the YouTube issues we’re discussing today can not be delivered via the fast track, so until the extension passes the lengthy review process, they will not become available to Chrome users.

What about other browsers?

Browsers that don’t use Chromium and therefore don’t operate under Manifest V3 are few and far between. The most famous of them is, of course, Mozilla Firefox, which uses its own browser engine called Gecko. Mozilla supports Manifest V3 as a specification, but also hasn’t dropped the support for Manifest V2, so ad blockers there can keep using powerful blocking APIs. It allows them, among other things, to update filters automatically and independently from the extension. This may explain why Firefox users haven’t reported as many issues with YouTube — they likely received the necessary fixes via automatic filter updates.

There are some other niche cases like Brave browser. It is based on Chromium, and so Manifest V3 does fully apply there, with all its limitations. But Brave also features its own, built-in ad-blocking feature called ‘Shields.’ Brave updates its Shields filter lists automatically without requiring a browser update. However, it doesn’t use AdGuard filter lists by default, so unless you’ve added them manually, we can’t comment on whether the issues with YouTube comments and description should be resolved for you or not.

A systemic problem

This situation highlights a much larger problem in the world of ad blockers: the systemic limitations imposed by major platforms like Google, which control the ecosystem for most browser extensions. While it may seem like a simple bug that could be fixed, the reality is far more complex. The restrictions introduced by Manifest V3 and enforced through the Chrome Web Store review process are part of a broader trend of reducing flexibility for users and developers alike.

In the words of Andrey Meshkov, AdGuard’s Co-Founder and CTO:

The recent Manifest V3 changes in Chromium […] severely limited what ad blockers can do in Chromium-based browsers. You probably don’t feel it right now because we’ve been able to work with the Chromium team and shape the API in a way that covers most of our needs. But what’s been crippled is the ability to improve it further. It now takes much more time to implement changes — it may take years to introduce a new feature in MV3.

Circling back to the (understandable and justified) users’ dissatisfaction in regard to the delay in fixing the YouTube issues, this delay in filter updates isn’t due to a bug or oversight by AdGuard, but rather a ‘by design’ limitation in how updates are allowed to roll out. With Manifest V3, Google showed that it is prioritizing security and privacy, even if it means crippling the functionality of popular tools like ad blockers, leaving users without immediate fixes for issues like those happening on YouTube right now.

While AdGuard and other ad blockers continue to innovate within the restrictions of MV3, it's clear that this isn’t just a one-time issue — it’s part of a larger, ongoing struggle between user needs and platform policies. Problems like this have become more frequent since the shift to MV3, and when they occur on major platforms like YouTube, they emphasize the deeper conflict between protecting user privacy and security and allowing for a customizable web experience.

So what can you do as an ad-blocking user to mitigate longer filter update delays such as this one? There are a couple possible solutions:

• Get a standalone, system-level ad blocker like AdGuard for Windows or AdGuard for Mac. It will filter the traffic of your entire device and will not depend on any browser when it comes to filter updates. On top of that, the capabilities of a system blocker are exceeding what a browser extension can do.
• Switch to a different browser. Mozilla and other Gecko-based browsers do not rely on Manifest V3 and are not affected by its limitations, while browsers like Brave or Mullvad offer built-in protection from ads and trackers.