It seems like the main benefit of such frontends is the lack of trackers and fingerprinting, but what if the browser, like Firefox, already did that with UBlock Origin and fingerprinting protection?
Think about performance improvement since the frontend does not load things which gets deleted by an addon, so it’s lighter on resources.
Talking about privacy, using a frontend prevents Google from getting your IP.
That’s not entirely correct, invidious doesn’t act as a proxy. From the invidious faq:
By default, the video stream is fetched directly from Google’s servers (
googlevideo.com) in order to reduce the bandwidth required by invidious, meaning that Google will be able to see your IP address and some other data commonly sent by web browsers, like your user-agent string.That’s invidious, piped actually act as a proxy (which is what I use).
Thanks for pointing out.
Also they limit the amount of data your device sends to Google when using YouTube.
Reddit’s performance is actually unusable on mobile unless you use infinity
This is even more true if you subscribe to channels using rss feeds from invidious, then simply use yt-dlp to grab the video directly from the URL. You also can use the noscript extension to selectively block the google video script and instead use yt-dlp to download the video. Using this over a no logging VPN like Mullvad prevents google from tracking your IP. Finally yt-dlp not only allows for use with invidious, but has a sponsorblock flag, which will cut out the mentions of sponsors in the video and then paste it back together, essentially autoskipping the sponsor mentions.
On Android, you can download an app from FDroid called Seal that basically uses yt-dlp, and can be customized to use the same flags.
- Adblockers aren’t perfect, and unless you’re running an ultra-paranoid uMatrix setup, you’re likely running some scripts you don’t want to.
- Cookies, even “”“necessary”“” first party ones, can be used for tracking.
- Unless you use reddit’s old. subdomain (which they might kill at any moment), reddit’s and youtube’s webclients are bloated beyond belief.
- Browsers have far more ways to fingerprint you than some api calls or webscraping over tcp on a 3rd party client; especially with javascript enabled.
- Webclients are often ugly and painful to use.
- You can completely avoid the algorithm.
- Due to the relative obscurity, you can avoid the arms race between projects like uBlock and social media platforms. youtube-dl got some legal flak, but yt-dlp is continuing its legacy.
Isn’t YouTube blocking things like uBlock
If your ublock is up to date it still works fine.
