I tried everything, even thought I had malware. Well I did have malware, designed by google, and uploaded to the youtube.com website on google’s servers, which is distributed to the earth, malware written and coded by Google to cause youtube to crash when Brave adblocking is enabled.
Before figuring out the isuue, I tried everything, and I am very tech savvy. I wiped out all brave directories, fresh installed the latest version, even tried the nightly, cleared everything, cleaned my registry, but all yet still I would set up a new browser and open youtube and instant crash.
The problem is caused by Google’s youtube company, as the Google engineers have intentionally written malicious malware causing the browser to crash intentionally when youtube is opened with adblocking enabled.
However, the iussue is more severe. Not only does youtube.com crash, but ANY site which happens to load a youtube video, even including fafsa.gov (!!!), instantly crashes from youtube’s malware.
Hopefully brave can find a workaround, but this is a huge problem for people on old systems that are on windows 7, since Brave no longer supports windows 7 and likely isn’t going to release a fix for google’s malware for the old versions that support windows 7. So we will need to also create a fork of Brave to support windows 7, which still millions of people use with no plans to change, unless Brave agrees to fix this critical issue for windows 7 users too.
TESTING/DEBUGGING:
- Windows 7 SP1, latest version (issue also occurs on Windows 10 and 11, which I have on another computer)
- I tried latest version of Brave for windows 7 on both release and nightly
- TEMP FIX: on a fresh install, problem is only solved when deactivating one setting:
brave://settings/shields > Trackers & ads blocking > switch to Disabled
This may be solvable by whitelisting youtube, but this is not acceptable and only a temporary fix.
Commentary:
I am sure there is some engineer or engineer team at google celebrating since they released this malware on youtube a few days ago, after testing to ensure that Brave crashes as they wanted to do after yotube’s malware update.
But their celebration will be shortlived, because the open source community is going to hear about this and I am calling for a change from chromium-based browsers over to a new, non-google based browser framework. It may take some time to develop and a few years to achieve widespread adoptance, but it will begin now.
Google/youtube software engineers may be celebrating now, but by creating actual malware that exploits the browser, this is not even grey-hat, this is black-hat hacking, and I consider chromium-based browsers to no longer be safe.
It is time to make a break even from google’s open-source chromium framework, because google engineers are now using black-hat strategies to further their own agenda. Today it is for maliciously terminating chromium browsers that are using ad blocking, but what will it be tomorrow? Who knows, but they have opened a can of worms that cannot be closed, because they have broken their final trust in the open source community.
So go on, celebrate, googledevs! You did successfully create black-hat malware that crashes people’s browsers who are using an ad blocker on youtube, but you have broken trust that will destroy google’s dominance and monopoly over the browser empire. It was a hard fought battle, but one black-hat google dev team has destroyed what could have been a permanent browser monopoly.
This tirade completed, brave needs to find a solution for this.