Bypass YouTube Fake Buffering Delays

YouTube is A/B testing ‘fake buffering’, adding a backoff equal to 80% of ad duration to initial video playback when ads are blocked.

This backoff delay applies to the first video request and happens regardless of ad blocking, but only noticeable by adblock users.

Setting isInlinePlaybackNoAd to true in the InnerTube JSON request prevents ads and thus the fake buffering backoff.

uBlock Origin can inject this property by hooking JSON.stringify or, when blocked by YouTube’s locker script, by hooking Object.assign.

Direct navigation embeds ytInitialPlayerResponse on the server side, requiring removal of that data to force a controllable player request.

YouTube locks global methods in some tests, so uBlock must use HTML filtering on Firefox or Object.assign proxying on Chromium to bypass the locker script.