Did ad blockers survive YouTube's offensive? Letting numbers talk
TL;DR version:
From June to August, the number of active users of the AdGuard Ad Blocker extension for Chrome dropped by about 8%. But in late August, the trend reversed. The temporary slump in user growth was offset by the increased demand in the second half of the year.
After a brief period of turbulence that lasted about a month, we saw the trend stabilize. And while the daily number of uninstalls was still higher than before YouTube's crackdown, it remained consistently lower than the number of daily installs.
After media reports and YouTube’s own statements implied that ad blockers were doomed, and especially after more and more users started noticing that their ad blocking extensions were not working properly on YouTube, we did indeed see a spike in uninstalls. However, at the same time, the number of installs also increased significantly! It may well be that the way ad blockers’ woes were amplified in the media inadvertently boosted their popularity and helped them woo new users.
The takeaway from all of this is that ad blockers — first and foremost, ad-blocking extensions — were rocked by YouTube’s onslaught, but survived. And, moreover, the interest has rebounded, as is evidenced by the growth in the number of active users.
I haven't observed any problems with uBlock Origin on Firefox.
For those curious how efficient these things are, recently I did some tests using this tool (clear your cache between tests).
I had decided to install an additional DNS blocker on my OpenWRT router so I was curious how these methods stack up against each other.
I tested uBlock Origin (default lists, reports 116k network filters), the Firefox (122) built-in ETP (Enhanced Tracking Protection) and the router adblock (only a modest 65k IPs in the default set, you can add more lists).
I got a 100% on iOS using Wipr. Not sure that’s accurate if ublock origin didn’t even get a 100%…
Must be a different statistic, I believe OPs stats are "percent of total traffic blocked" so 100% means your entire network would be blocked..
What list are you using on your router? I'm using Steven Black's list (which is just an amalgamation of a bunch of other lists) for my PiHole/uBlock filter list, and Firefox+uBlock Origin scored 99% (only failing the cosmetic static ad test).
While easy to do, issue with doing this is you don't give active views to the lists that get combine so the owners of those lists are less inclined to update/maintain them. I would recommend if the list is useful to get each of the combine lists he uses and add them all separately.
It's the Adblock package for OpenWRT. The default selection is adaway, adguard, disconnect, yoyo, which is 3 x 10k lists and one 30k list.
I see that it has support for compiling Steve Black lists but SB can vary 50 - 500k and I only have a router with 128 MB RAM. I'll have to experiment with the "standard" SB list, see if it fits and if it makes any difference.
Same. Didn't even get any youtube pop-ups regarding adblocker detection. Also no slowing down observed (as was reported in some articles a while back).
I got a pop up once, I cleared the ublock cache and never had any issues after.
I saw a popup once, refreshed and it was gone. 🤣
Those slowndown article were clickbait / bad journalism , youtube hasn't been slowing down the site for adblock user.
Same. Not one interruption during the crackdown.
I've noticed the occasional jump cut forwards in video where there should've been ads, just two or three seconds.
I moved from Vivaldi to Firefox during the crackdown, signed out all of my Google accounts, and immediately noticed the problems went away. Sorry Vivaldi...
I've just stumbled over Floorp, which to my understanding has many of Vivaldis features Firefox doesn't, like a sidebar, and is based on Firefox
I've gotten the pop-up once or twice, but updating uBlock fixed that.
I have instead noticed a large decrease in quality, things like frozen images/pages and endless buffering. I don't know if all that is related, but it did start around the time YouTube started cracking down on ad blockers.
Missing piece in the numbers here is how many people were uninstalling adguard to switch to uBlock? Using one extension's install stats to make conclusions about all adblocking extensions seems a bit much.
Right? I've never even heard of adguard
AgGuard was (is?) big on Android and DNS. Helped to get rid of ads in many apps.
Yeah their DNS url was pretty useful in blocking ads on the go when away from my pihole. But I still preferred uBlock on browsers
May also indicate that users were shopping around for a blocker that worked against Youtube. Maybe some of those users actually just settled with AdGuard coming from ABP, or uBlock, or whoever.
Pretty sure they did that on purpose, trying to skew the narrative. The goal is to make it seem like it's all doom and gloom because it'll get people to read the article to the end, and maybe in their minds get some people to stop using adblockers.
I've been using uBlock Origin in Firefox on both Linux and Android this whole time. If Lemmy hadn't lit up about it, I wouldn't have noticed. I never saw one ad or that "dur hur no ad block" message.
And I let Youtube ads run for YEARS. Ads basically everywhere on the net have become intolerable in their content and quantity, so I said enough. And it is 100% Adsense's fault.
The fact that ads are so intolerable is the problem. I understand that much of the internet being free is because of ads. But we went from the early days of the internet where ads were malicious, active annoyances to the modern internet where ads are malicious, passive annoyances. Clicking on an ad no longer ruins my afternoon with a virus, but it does log and sell my data to the highest bidder. Nearly every ad on the internet is in bad faith.
Until we have better ads, I will block absolutely everything I can.
There's no such a thing as good ads. Not even before the internet.
I was reading a huffpost article the other day on my work computer on Firefox that doesn't have an ad blocker. The page was refreshing with new ads every 5 seconds and took up like 20% more CPU power than before I opened the page.
So huffpost is now in my mental blocklist.
yeah we need a coalition of sites that agree a single page serve is fine, they don't need tons of garbage running in the background.
Yeah I've always been on firefox and I haven't noticed a single thing change during the last year of all this hubbub about Youtube.
uBlock seems to have won the arms race, since whenever I had problems it worked again after updating it.
With unlock I didn't even know there was an arms race. Seamless performance the whole time!
I've never given Youtube a cent and I always use adblock, on the endpoints and my network, and I have had no problems watching anything I wanted on youtube. I guess you just have to mercilessly block ads at all levels to achieve dominance
Yeah, never noticed a thing of this "war" because of FF and uBlock origin.
It all just kept working, including on Youtube.
So far, no ads on YouTube. The defenses hold!
Youtube is fine for me, never stopped working here on firefox with ublock origin, but twitch though, yesterday I couldn't watch any stream for 5 seconds without a error that only went away after turning everything off and letting the ads flow.
Check out TTV LOL PRO. It's available on Firefox and Chrome and blocks all the ads on Twitch. Very rarely I'll get a purple "streamer is taking an ad break" screen, but I haven't seen an ad in quite a while.
I was using video-swap-new from the ad solutions GitHub for months, only recently this happened, such a shame.
TTV LOL does it via a proxy. You can set it up so that it only proxies ads. As far as Twitch knows, you're still being served ads.
Ive been using the vaft script permalink with no issues, as recently as last night.
Same here. Firefox and uBlock Origin. My son uses Chrome with uBlock Origin and was having problems. Constantly and me to check and never a problem. I mostly only watch YouTube on ReVanced
I had that issue, then got a user agent switcher and made my firefox on linux look like chrome on windows and I have no issues. Using ublock origin
I wonder if they saw a large enough down tick is user traffic to realize that endlessly badgering people with 5 ads to watch a 30 second clip is driving away their user base.
I know my YouTube consumption has decreased by a factor of 10. I used to use it for almost all of my streaming entertainment. In conjunction with other streaming services’ password sharing crackdown, I am spending more time reading and going outside than I have in the past decade. That’s a trend these providers don’t want catching on.
My YouTube use is going down because the algorithm absolutely sucks now. I went to the gaming tab 2 hours after the state of play and it was nowhere to be found. But outdated years old crap was being shown.
But never had any ad issues with ublock origin or revanced.
If I had to watch ads, I would not use youtube. Period.
This. My preferred way of catching up to my favorite channels nowadays is watching their content on LibreTube with AdBlock and SponsorBlock on and supporting them on Patreon if they have one.
Yeah, recently had my Android with adblockers break, and my YT consumption is almost non-existent now as I watch more on mobile devices than on PC.
As an aside, if anyone has any advice for a ReVanced-like app for iOS, I'm all ears. I miss my Pixel 🥲
Adblocker will die when there's no more ads to see.
the surviving AI will be upset at the loss of revenue that occurs, but since they'll exterminate the human race, it's not an entirely unexpected side effect.
I got hit hard by the cpu bombing that youtube did to punish adblocking, to the point i had to stop watching videos while playing games.
cause having a video running while playing a game would bomb my performance so hard that I'd go from 150+fps to 15fps.
I think, ultimately, Googles war against adblockers Streisand'd the fuck out of adblockers and probably got more people ultimately to use them, either out of spite of googles bullshit or because they saw the arguments and realized the web was far better with a digital condom.
The cpu bombing actually wasn't Youtube, it was adblock plus (if thats what you were using)
Nope, I use ublock origin.
and never had a problem of youtube impacting games before.
I don't know how true that is about YouTube intentionally CPU bombing ad block users specifically.
I will say though that websites run by big tech companies getting much heavier and more poorly optimized is ultimately just a fact of life. They don't care about optimization, in fact it benefits them more that people have the latest and greatest hardware so that's what they're going to target. Ultimately that means that these websites will get slower on older hardware with time, and people will rely more and more on alternative frontends to access content, and it won't really matter if you have ad blockers or not (*turning it off on a bloated site that is bogging down your CPU might actually make it worse).
Keep using adblockers and don't surrender your digital freedom to big tech corporations. Also check out private frontends for YouTube (and other plattforms: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/frontends/
Still using Firefox + ublock origin + sponsorblock. I've not seen an ad on YouTube for years.
On my phone I'm using Tubular, a fork of NewPipe with Sponsorblock integration.
Yeah ditto, been working fine for me
Same, on phone Newpipe works fine for me so far.
Seen plenty of people talking about the crazy ads they see on Youtube. Right wing propaganda, blatant grifting, scams... Folding Ideas has done not one but two videos talking about the ads he saw and picking them apart. Surely the people complaining about these ads know adblockers exist right? Why don't they use them? I'm sure there are several reasons but, it's been a known quantity for decades that you have the power to control how many and what kind of ads you see.
Is Tubular an Android only thing? I can’t find it. I'm still looking for an iOS solution.
You can use Yattee with this guide
Will try this tonight. Thanks!
If this doesn't work for you, I have another (not as great) option that I used to use, back when I was using iOS. You can find a Invidious or Piped instance you like and a shortcut to it on your home screen. Obviously, that's not as great as having a nice native app, but it works.
Youtube still works fine with uBlock Origin. I've had the adblock detection pop up a few times, but updating the filters fixed it every time. I will never uninstall my ad blocker. The web is not usable without it.
Are the adblocker-detection bits a chrome/ium-only thing? I use firefox w/ ublock origin and I've never gotten any
I've gotten it on Firefox this week.
Since I very rarely comment on anything, the solution is generally to just log out of my account.
I need to learn the filter truck mentioned above.
The what now?
Filter update. No clue how autocorrect got truck out of that.
Perhaps you originally meant to write trick?
Yeah I'm normally logged in ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah I have my adblocker disabled on edge on my work laptop as it messes with my web dev.
I accidentally used it for general browsing and I couldn't believe what people put up with! It's like a totally different internet.
that effect is amplified in areas with only shit-tier internet, like half of rural america.
Never saw ads against adblock. I use firefox with ublock, and alterbative sponsorblock clients for youtube on android :)
This is what I use also, but youtube stopped it and blocked the videos. The work around was opening in an incognito window.
Never had any problems. Did you used to log into an account, maybe that makes a difference?
Same I also add Decentraleyes and Privacy Badger to my repertoire. Never had a problem but maybe I should think about the sponsorblock extension as well
YouTube slowing itself down to unusable made me write a local extension that takes any YouTube watch link and opens it in yewtu.be my life has been better since. Fuck you tube's stance. You're gonna make the experience terrible I'll watch your content via another client.
For those of us who can't code their own extensions: LibRedirect does this for other sites as well, not just YouTube.
Oh, ty. This will replace a few extensions for me.
Very cool! I'm walking this same route, but with LibRedirect and Invidious Instance Selector Firefox addons. Maybe libraries can do community video-hosting and moderation? But please, no more businesses
Have you tried LibRedirect? It works for quite a bit more than just youtube. I personally love it for the fandom mirrors.
I'm not familiar with yewtu.be, but couldn't you accomplish the the same thing with a simple Host File entry in your operating system? Get the IP of yewtu.be (by pinging it which I just did to get 104.244.72.25), create an entry that says:
youtube.com 104.244.72.25So when your OS goes to find youtube.com, it gets directed to the IP of yewtu.be
No, the browser would still send YouTube.com as the host header. While yewtu.be could be configured to allow this to work, the TLS cert would not and the browser would get upset.
Your browser doesn't check SSL certificates?
Not only did I not uninstall my adblocker, I also switched to the Invidious front-end to avoid any anti-adblocking scripts, and I can also download videos now, and get no trackers at all.
Same here, it made me finally add some extra blocking on my router.
Did they survive? In my case, they got stronger.
In principle, I actually support the idea of people running sites being able to support themselves financially through advertising. I just don’t like when the ads go too far into obnoxious territory. So before all this, I used Adblock Plus with its "acceptable ads policy" to let through unobtrusive banner ads but block prerolls, large graphics, and interstitial ads.
Unfortunately, ABP didn’t adapt to YouTube’s changes quickly enough, so I switched to uBlock Origin. Now I don’t even see unobtrusive ads. Google shot themselves in the foot over this one.
When webmasters running homely sites with flavor of their own personality would add places for ad banners, that was fine. You usually knew what kind of content you'd see on which banners where, and they weren't as bad as now.
With modern ads served by companies stronger than many states, on platforms with less personality than many nation-states have, it just became something you never need which gets forced down your throat via phishing practices and works exactly as phishing.
Nobody who literally follows those ads and believes them does understand what they are doing. It's aimed at teens who can only poke fingers at screens and at elderly who can also often only poke fingers at screens.
It's a completely predatory thing by now, with no fair scenarios of usage. It should be outlawed if nothing else works.
Gosh, at this point I'd approve of an official state-standardized replacement of the Web, intentionally limited in extensibility, a bit like Gemini, only without the "minimalist" and "small" parts, which would be mandatory for state institutions, medical institutions, educational institutions, public transport etc. Maybe more similar to HyperCard or having some PostScript support there =\
Honestly this is why I'm so bullish on ActivityPub. Like this video sort of gets at (apologies that that's a Nebula link. I think you can get one Nebula video for free if you're not a subscriber, or you can wait until it goes up on the TechAltar YouTube channel after a couple of days or maybe a week—the full interviews with fediverse people are unlikely to go on YT though; I'm currently watching the Automattic CEO interview and finding it brilliant), federation is a really great way of going back to a world of smaller sites hosted by people with a passion for what they're doing. But it'll be even better, because of the ability to interact with all these different sites with one unified account. Tumblr and WordPress embracing ActivityPub are an awesome step in that direction.
edit: looks like the main video is already up on YouTube. Must have been only a 1 day delay on this one.
I was someone who always knew about ad blockers, but just wasn’t bothered enough to use them.
I used YouTube SO much that it was worth it to me to have premium.
After all the bitching and moaning from YouTube last year, I un subbed, downloaded free tube instead, and also finally added an ad blocker to both my mobile and desktop browser.
I imagine I’m not the only one with that story haha.
I'm watching YouTube right now with uBlock Origin working without issue.
I have the same with ublock, however the video quit with sponsorblock. Ublock doesn’t block all yt ads.
Are you using Ublock, or Ublock Origin? Origin is the one you want.
Origin. Just shortened it up for brevity’s sake.
Then, there’s this: https://restoreprivacy.com/state-spyware-extensively-using-ads-as-distribution-channel/
For this reason alone, fuck any company banning ad blockers.
Its literally always been that way. When a webmaster gives up control of their content, it gets exploited.
Yeah, malvertising has been a thing for over a decade, maybe closer to two. And it is something hosts at every level have had to deal with, including NYT and BBC.
I'd have no issue allowing ads if company's properly vetted what was being advertised and did so through their own host/domain, because then you'd know that there was a human between you and whomever they're selling space to. And I've seen a few small blogs do this sort of thing when I've been deep down a rabbit hole trying to solve a problem, and I respect the hell out of them for being willing to do the legwork to own what you serve. But most places want to do ad sales at such volume that its just not 'economically feasible' (ie, it eats away at the money they're getting from the ads) to do so.
Honestly, whenever I want to watch YT, I just open YT with uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock in a Private Tab. Haven't really noticed anything, and honestly it helps me to stop watching videos.
I never even noticed their 'battle' using YouTube revanced. (only youtube client I use)
Well I'm not seeing any ads, so I'd say yes
Didn't uninstall any of my AdBlock layers, but YouTube didn't survive.
Even though I actually never saw the famous popup, the whole thing made me take steps after months of feeling that the recommendations sucked and I was often wasting lots of time watching stuff I didn't even like.
Now I'm actually getting back into reading and audiobooks, and using invidious for the occasional watch.
I can't remember the last time I saw an ad on any of my devices, so I'd say "lol"
I saw the Youtube banner telling me it detected an ad blocker and wouldn't let me watch a lot for about a week. Now it's been over two months with nothing but smooth sailing on μBlock Origin. I'm even back to being able to block Shorts from appearing on my sub feed, where before it seemed like any YT-specific filters would let them detect the blocker.
How do you block shorts? Please and thanks.
I recently found Firefox has extensions for blocking them on your homepage works a treat with app an sponsor block.
Added them the last time my hide for 30 days expired and the option was gone.
Seriously why the fuck would I want to watch vertical videos on my desktop that if I wasn't blocking them would be bookends by ads longer than the fucking video
I know that the re-vanced app on Android has a setting to remove them. Not sure about desktop.
There's a set of filters that hides them from your feed and from search results. If I remember tonight, I'll share it when I'm back on my home computer.
Here's my list of uBO filters that hides Shorts from Youtube
This made me discover freetube, which is ads free and an excellent way to cut on YouTube « time sink » that Google is so good at, with its recommended tab, auto play feature, clickbait title.
I read the announcements but I haven't seen an ad yet on any of my shit.
I do decree!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
I do decree!
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
How many still didn't subscribe to YouTube Premium?
Tubular on my phone and firefox with ublock origin on my PC. don't have money to pay anyways.
Heroes.
I've always just used uBlock on Chrome and I never see ads. I'm not doing anything other than that so it surprises me so many people have such trouble with ads.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In late October, YouTube confirmed that it had “launched a global effort” to make users disable ad blockers on the site.
Like many other Google-owned services, YouTube has been making the bulk of its money by showing targeted ads that are embedded directly in the user-generated content.
and its cult status in the media-playing-and-streaming landscape, the escalation of the YouTube’s war against ad blockers drew a lot of media attention.
However, we needed time to make the necessary adjustments — not least because until YouTube expanded its test to a significant portion of its users, we had a very limited set of data to work with.
Note: For illustrative purposes, we have truncated the graph so the 8% drop in the number of users during the early stages of YouTube’s crackdown may appear more pronounced than it actually was
After an initial panic, users stopped deserting the AdGuard Ad Blocker extension for Chrome en masse.
The original article contains 979 words, the summary contains 155 words. Saved 84%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
GrayJay has been great for Android, I haven't had any issues watching YouTube.
Using the built-in Ad blocking on Brave browser (both Android and Desktop) I haven't had any slowness or issues with YouTube at all.
So the news about it being due to a bug with certain browsers and not YouTube itself just went completely under the radar?
And you believed it with a straight face?
Considering the statement came from the Adblock Plus developer and not some random fuckwit on Reddit without proof?
Why are people using ad blockers instead of using new pipe? I've been using it for a year or something with zero ads and issues
Not everyone is using Youtube exclusively on their phones, you know?
Seems like a worthwhile reason to get BlueStacks.
Why should I use an Android emulator to run an app on PC instead of the many browser front ends for YouTube?
or an adblocker and tampermonkey for that matter
People keep complaining about frontends and plugins failing and having to switch strategies, but newpipe works flawlessly.
It's less work.
I've never had that issue with Piped or Invidious, though sometimes I've had a specific instance not load. There are literal dozens of instances though.
However, I've had numerous issues with Bluestacks and it's a huge memory hog, not to mention it's overkill to install an entire OS just for 1 singular purpose that can be done just fine on your native OS.
It's a layer of abstraction that's almost entirely unnecessary except for 1 use case: watching YouTube without ads.
It's five clicks. That's not a big issue for most people.
Calling it an entire os or a layer of abstraction doesn't negate the simplicity of 5 minutes of set up and five clicks, and then it works perpetually.
It's probably more trouble to set up some of these plugins and frontends.
Also once you have any emulator installed, you can use all of your favorite apps straight on your desktop.
It's extremely convenient.
You know what's more convenient?
https://piped.kavin.rocks/
Lol. You are ridiculous.
It's more ridiculous that you find a single 5-minute period to access years of content ridiculous.
No, I find it ridiculous that you are recommending that others use such a woefully bloated method simply because you remember it taking 5 minutes and have used it for years.
I don't intend to change your mind, I intend to imply to others reading that this is a silly and bloated way to do it that most people shouldn't follow unless they actually require Bluestacks for something, such as app testing or to use an Android app that contains specific functionality not available on PC.
Also, I remember when NewPipe was ass, so it also took that dev a "really long time" to come up with a functional app. Not really sure what your point is other than to attempt to delegitimize a solution that is better than yours. :b
Simply to point out your continued inaccuracies.
Someone else working out a solution that works better than your myriad of suggestions really seems to bother you.
You keep pretending that a couple of minutes is some laborious chore that no one would ever be able to work through.
You can keep pretending that installing two programs is difficult, but it isn't, and nobody following your inaccurate and easily disproved claims one after the other is going to take you seriously.
No one is saying that setting up NewPipe on Bluestacks is particularly difficult.
Everyone is just trying to tell you that it's a needlessly convoluted way of watching YouTube videos on desktop, and that there exists many better options to achieve the same end result. Do what works for you, I definitely have some weird workflows and hacky work-arounds too, but expect people to push back if you try to recommend it to others because it's a pretty bad recommendation.
Not if you have to run an entire android emulator to access it.
Haha, an "an entire Android emulator"?
You click twice to install it.
Click twice to install any app.
Click once to use the app perpetually.
That's not as much work as you're pretending it is.
It's more work than using an alternate front end in the browser... of which there are plenty of excellent options... all which are optimized for use on desktop. But you do you I guess.
Can you give me an example?
It took me 5 minutes and five clicks and I've been using it for a year on my phone and desktop.
I don't consider something that simple and convenient work, so I'm curious what you mean by "less work". Do you mean the front ends take 3 minutes to install instead of 5 minutes?
Obviously can't be down time since you can't have a less than zero downtime, but what do you mean by "less work"?
Piped.video and Yewtu.be are both web frontends that work in the browser and require no installation.
Freetube has installers for windows/mac/linux with no need for the overhead of android emulation.
I haven't tried this out but I wonder if any of the popular Android youtube clients would work with Windows Subsystems for Android on Win11. It'd be way harder to setup than Bluestacks but would require less overhead.
You don't have to install anything, just go to https://yewtu.be/
Oh cool. Thanks.
I'll chose to interpret this comment as a joke, but if anyone wants a desktop app for YouTube, check out FreeTube. No ads, subscriptions without a Google account, Sponsorblock integration, videos can be proxied through Invidious if wanted.
Oh it's okay, if your comment is a joke you probably don't need to write it.
I meant your comment that I replied to. Suggesting emulating an Android app as the easiest way to watch YouTube on desktop is plain old silly.
It takes 5 minutes and works flawlessly, that seems like a pretty solid choice.
Because:
A) New Pipe is a phone app only.
B) People view YouTube on devices other than phones.
C) People view more websites than just YouTube, on which they also want to block ads.
the latter is why you just disable the adblocker on specific sites, instead of uninstalling it completely which leaves you open to all the malware infested ads and shit everywhere.
Disable my adblocker? No thank you. I can't think of anything I'm not willing to abandon if it won't work with an adblocker.
plenty of users are uninstalling at one site's (yt) demand... instead of just whitelisting instead.
Ew
I've yet to get a new pipe link to work on phone or desktop. Not sure what I'm doing wrong.
I'm confused about "new pipe links".
Newpipe is an app. Do you have trouble setting it as a default app for youtube links?
That may be it. There's a bot on lemme thst responds to all YouTube links with piped links, and I've tried to follow those directly. I was unaware of an app. Thanks.
Oh, I didn't know about the bot. So I guess that's Piped (https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped) which is a frontend like invidious (https://github.com/iv-org/invidious) and usually when it doesn't work switching instance should do the job.
Newpipe is a different project: https://newpipe.net/
On desktop you can also use FreeTube: https://freetubeapp.io/
You could grab BlueStacks or some Android sim and then use the app on your desktop, works like a charm.