Ad Accelerator mutes and speeds up YouTube ads

Ad Accelerator is a new browser extension for Chromium-based web browsers such as Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge. It's only purpose is to make ads on YouTube easier to bear. The extension does so by muting ads when detected and increasing their playback speed. Put simply, it fast forwards and mutes advertisement on YouTube.

It uses a slightly different technique than the recently reviewed Fadblock extension. Fadblock skips or fast-forwards advertisement on YouTube. The developer has turned the extension into a commercial extension in the meantime and ratings have tanked as a consequence.

Google is cracking down on the use of ad-blockers on YouTube. The site may display prompts to users when it detects content blockers which ask users to either turn off the ad-blocker or buy YouTube Premium.

While most conventional content blockers, such as uBlock Origin, have always recovered from new anti-ad-blocking techniques on YouTube, it is always a good idea to know about other potential techniques to deal with advertisement on the popular video publishing site.

Ad Accelerator

Ad Accelerator installs fine in any Chromium-based browser and works automatically from that moment on. The extension mutes advertisement as soon as it detects it on YouTube. It accelerates the ad's playback furthermore, but does not skip ads at this point. You will see the advertisement, but only for a fraction of the time it takes to play normally.

This is the main difference to Fadblock, which supports skipping ads. The main difference is that skipping is faster than fast forwarding ads.

Ad Accelerator is an open source browser extension. You can check out the source code on GitHub.

The developer posted a list of ideas that could some day be implemented. Apart from support for other video hosting services, including Hulu, Netflix and Dailymotion, there is also one entry for manually clicking to fast forward on YouTube.

The technique to skip ads entirely is not present on the list, but that does not necessarily mean that it is not in development.

Closing Words

Google's attempt to fight content blockers on YouTube could turn into an arms race. The fast-forwarding technique is quickly rising to popularity as it works really well.

Technically, these extensions do not block advertisement on YouTube. They fast forward and mute them only, which is not the same thing.

They are allowed in the Chrome Web Store for now, but only time will tell if that is going to last.

Now You: do you watch videos on YouTube?

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