That is not their official website btw. The maintainer of uBO has stated that he doesn’t want a website
He doesn’t want a forum or a website, thus he won’t have any costs and he won’t have to accept donations meaning he doesn’t have to deal with the administrative workload and that way he has more time to develop uBlock Origin.
Obviously it’s intentional, it’s Google, what do you expect from this piece of shit Big Tech corporation? Don’t be evil has already belonged to the past for a long time.
NewPipe is an Android app that allows you to watch YouTube videos without ads or tracking. It exposes your IP to Google servers though. Piped consists of a web client and a backend server, it uses the NewPipeExtractor on the server to load the video as well as all the metadata from Google servers and then serves it to you through the web client. That way, you don’t have to connect to Google, only the Piped server communicates with YouTube servers.
That’s why we need to switch away from this proprietary garbage and use Firefox or LibreWolf (Firefox on steroids with less bloat, improved privacy and even pre-installed uBlock Origin)
If the alternatives don’t use a Firefox user-agent, it’ll also have the same effect in reducing the amount of Firefox traffic in their logs.
When you stream a video from Google servers through the Invidious frontend and you use Firefox, the user-agent that gets reported to googlevideo.com (the domain that the requests for YouTube video streams are sent to) is Firefox. You can easily verify that yourself, go to an Invidious instance using Firefox, make sure to disable ‘Proxy videos’ in the Invidious settings, open the Developer Tools, go the Network tab and load a video. Click on any request to *.googlevideo.com and look at the user-agent, you can see, it’s a Firefox user-agent. This thread explains how the slowdown is introduced in YouTube JavaScript: https://feddit.it/pictrs/image/0e13c670-4966-4073-89df-f042fe9cc6de.webp