Which Chrome Ad Blocker Blocks YouTube? 5 TESTED (2026)

Key takeaways

• Full uBlock Origin no longer runs on Chrome. It is Manifest V2, now deprecated and removed from Chrome installs. On Chrome you get uBlock Origin Lite (~16M users) — gorhill’s MV3 build, the deepest free pure ad blocker still standing on Chrome.
• None of the top blockers block YouTube or Twitch video ads. SuperchargePerformance is the only one that does — plus popups, cookie banners, and tab memory management.
• Your best setup depends on one question: do you just want ads gone, or do you want video ads, consent popups, and RAM under control too?

A news article takes six seconds to load. Three ad scripts fight for the render thread. A cookie consent banner covers half the screen. You close it, and a newsletter popup slides up from the bottom. Meanwhile Chrome is burning through 4 GB of RAM across your 30 open tabs, and YouTube just hit you with two unskippable pre-rolls.

Five blockers get pitched as the fix. None of them fix all of it, and one of the most famous — full uBlock Origin — no longer even runs on Chrome. What each one actually does, verified on Chrome 149 in June 2026, and which combination covers your specific situation.

The Comparison Table

This is what you came for. Every claim verified against current Chrome Web Store listings and developer sources (June 2026).

Read on for what the table doesn’t capture — the trade-offs, the edge cases, and which setup actually fits how you use Chrome.

uBlock Origin — The Standard That Left Chrome

v1.71.0, updated May 2026. Built and maintained by gorhill, the same developer, from scratch. No company behind it, no paid tier, no data collection. The extension has been publicly audited more times than most people have changed their passwords. For a decade it was the answer to “best ad blocker.”

Then Chrome changed the rules. The full build is a Manifest V2 extension, and Chrome finished disabling MV2 in 2025. Full uBlock Origin is now marked deprecated on the Chrome Web Store and is being removed from Chrome installs — its own README lists “end of support on Chrome 139.” On Chrome 149 it does not install or run. It still works fully on Firefox, which kept MV2 support, and that is now its home: the cosmetic filtering that hides ad containers even when the network isn’t in any blocklist, dynamic per-site blocking levels, the element picker, and the network request logger all live on there.

For Chrome, gorhill’s answer is uBlock Origin Lite (next section): a leaner MV3 build, not the full engine. So if you are on Chrome, the famous full uBlock Origin is no longer on the table. If you are willing to use Firefox, it remains the deepest pure content blocker there is.

One thing no version of uBlock Origin does, on any browser: YouTube and Twitch video ads still play, cookie consent banners stay on screen, and your 40 open tabs still eat RAM. It blocks network requests to ad and tracker servers — that is its scope, and within that scope nothing matches its depth.

uBlock Origin Lite — Zero Overhead

Same developer, leaner architecture, and now the only uBlock Origin that runs on Chrome. Lite has no persistent background process. Chrome evaluates its blocking rules natively, so the extension’s own code only runs when you open its popup. On a Chromebook or a laptop where every milliwatt counts, that difference is real. With ~16 million Chrome users, it is also the most-installed ad blocker built specifically for Chrome’s MV3 world.

The trade-off is real. No cosmetic filtering means some ad containers load but show up empty. No dynamic rules means you can’t customize blocking per site. For the roughly 80% of users who never touch settings, none of that surfaces in daily use. For the rest, it can frustrate within a week. Many people installed Lite without realizing it is the slimmed-down build, not the full engine they remember.

AdGuard — The Ecosystem Play

v5.4.2.0. ~17 million users — the largest install base of any blocker on this list. AdGuard’s free Chrome extension is fully MV3-native and does what uBlock Origin does for website ads. The paid standalone apps are where the ecosystem gets interesting: DNS-level blocking that catches requests before Chrome even processes them, expanded popup blocking, parental controls, and a 2-million-entry malicious website database.

If you run a home network and want one subscription covering browser, DNS, and mobile simultaneously, AdGuard’s ecosystem covers more surface area than any single extension. The app, the DNS service, and the browser extension share filter intelligence.

The trade-off is privacy. AdGuard is a business with subscription revenue. Their data handling is more complex than a solo developer project with no commercial incentive to touch your data. For some people that matters. For others, the broader protection scope is worth it.

Ghostery — Tracker Transparency

v10.5.45. Ghostery does something the others don’t: it shows you exactly who is tracking you, company by company, using the WhoTracks.Me database. The blocking is solid. The tracker breakdown panel is where Ghostery earns its install base — it turns the invisible surveillance economy into a visible list you can act on.

Cookie consent auto-removal is included free. The Plus tier adds priority support and additional features, but the core blocker and tracker dashboard are free.

Smaller user base (~2M) than the others, but a loyal one. If your primary motivation is understanding the tracking ecosystem rather than just blocking it silently, Ghostery is the most educational tool on this list.

SuperchargePerformance — When Ads Are Only Half the Problem

v1.4.2. This is not a traditional ad blocker. It is a browser optimization suite that happens to include ad blocking as one of six layers.

Layer 1: Ad and tracker blocking. 186,645 rules compiled from 22 curated sources. Three tiers — 100K ad and tracker domains on the free tier, 65K privacy and telemetry domains on Medium, 22K malware, phishing, and fraud domains on Pro. The rules are ranked by real-world traffic data, so the ad networks responsible for the most page-load damage get blocked first.

Layer 2: YouTube and Twitch video ads. Pre-rolls, mid-rolls, overlay ads, and YouTube’s anti-adblock popups — all handled. Twitch ad breaks are swapped for a clean backup stream, usually without interruption (a brief black screen or resolution dip can show during the swap). This is the biggest gap in every other blocker on this list. uBlock Origin Lite, AdGuard, Ghostery — none of them touch video ads on either platform, and neither does full uBlock Origin on Firefox.

Layer 3: Popup and popup-under blocking. The shady redirect that opens when you click a download link. The popup-under that appears behind your browser window and sits there until you find it hours later. The full-screen overlay that spawns a new tab when you click anywhere on it. All blocked. Same-domain popups, login windows, payment flows — those pass through.

Layer 4: Cookie consent auto-rejection. Powered by DuckDuckGo’s AutoConsent engine (v14.67.0). Detects over 100 consent management platforms, clicks “Reject All” automatically, removes the banner, and fixes the scroll lock that some consent popups leave behind. You stop seeing cookie banners entirely.

Layer 5: Cosmetic filtering. Hides ad containers, newsletter signup popups, paywall nags, and sponsored content blocks across all sites. Dedicated rules for YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit catch platform-specific ad elements that generic blockers miss.

Layer 6: Tab suspension and memory management. Inactive tabs are discarded from memory automatically. 25+ web apps are protected by default — Figma, Notion, Slack, Google Docs, and others stay active. A real-time RAM dashboard shows exactly how much memory each tab is using and how much you have saved.

Per-domain control lets you toggle 14 features independently for any site. Keep ad blocking on while disabling tab suspension. Whitelist a news site from content blocking but keep video ad blocking active for YouTube. The granularity is finer than anything else on this list.

The trade-off: the general filter list depth is narrower than full uBlock Origin’s. If a niche ad network slips through full uBO’s 300K+ filter rules (on Firefox) but not SuperchargePerformance’s 186K, that is a real difference for pure website ads. For video ads, popups, consent banners, and memory management, nothing else on this list comes close.

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Which Setup Fits You

A note on running both: Chrome’s static DNR rules come from a shared 300,000-rule pool across every installed extension, with each extension guaranteed a 30,000-rule minimum (Chrome 120 raised the ruleset ceilings). Pairing SuperchargePerformance with uBlock Origin Lite stays comfortably inside that pool. The real cost is duplicate evaluation — every network request gets matched against two filter sets with overlapping coverage, plus the runtime of a second extension. CPU and memory overhead is small but real.

SuperchargePerformance’s 186K rules are compiled from 22 curated sources covering ads, trackers, analytics, fingerprinting, malware, phishing, fraud, and ransomware. The lists are deduplicated against each other and ranked by Majestic Million traffic data. For most users, adding uBlock Origin Lite on top does not meaningfully improve blocking coverage — it just runs similar checks twice from different rule sources.

On YouTube and Twitch, two extensions injecting at the same point can also collide: non-deterministic load order means one can occasionally interfere with the other’s ad detection.

If you already run uBlock Origin Lite and want to add SuperchargePerformance for tab suspension and video ad blocking, set Perf’s content blocking to Off or Low to skip the duplicate work — let Lite handle general website ads while Perf handles video ads, popups, cookies, and tab memory.

If you searched for “Loon” expecting a YouTube ad blocker: Loon is a Chrome extension that surfaces Canadian-made product alternatives while you browse Amazon, Walmart, and Canadian Tire — it has nothing to do with ad blocking. The project is archived and no longer maintained.