How it works

The idea

YouTube publishes a player for websites. If a news site embeds a video, that's the player you're watching — served by YouTube, from youtube.com, same video. It has never carried the watch page's ad breaks, because YouTube didn't build them into it.

So Adios asks YouTube for that player, and puts it where the normal one was. Nothing is filtered. Nothing is stripped out. The ads aren't there because they were never in this player to begin with.

What that changes

Compared with a filter-list ad blocker, quite a lot:

• Nothing to keep updated. No rule lists, so nothing to go stale on a Tuesday when YouTube ships a change.
• Your traffic stays yours. Adios doesn't inspect network requests, because it isn't deciding what to block.
• Almost no permissions. A script on youtube.com and somewhere to keep your settings. It can't read any other site.
• It fails safely. If the swap doesn't work on some page, you get the normal YouTube player back rather than a black rectangle.

Keeping that reliable while YouTube reworks its watch page is most of what maintaining this actually involves.

Will YouTube shut it down?

They could. They own both players.

What I can say is that the usual detection doesn't apply here. YouTube's anti-ad-block checks look for the fingerprints of blocking — ad requests that never complete, ad slots missing from the page, playback code that's been patched. Adios produces none of those, because it isn't blocking. It's playing a player YouTube serves.

That's a much better place to stand than a filter list. It isn't a guarantee, and anyone telling you otherwise about any ad blocker is guessing. What I'll actually commit to is fixing it when it breaks.

What you give up

You're watching a different YouTube player, so a few player-specific things change:

• The controls are YouTube's, but laid out a little differently.
• Watch-page extras like the miniplayer and theater toggle behave differently or aren't there.
• Shorts and live streams aren't covered.

Quality, captions, playback speed and fullscreen all work — those belong to the player, and it's still YouTube's player. Everything outside the video frame is untouched: same page, same comments, same recommendations.