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You are on MacOS which still uses 95+% Safari engine and whatever browser you installed acts as a UI wrapper to it so not much you can do on that front. Plus, you are using a dated version of the OS to boot.
Can you upgrade your OS or is it not supported by the machine?
The upgrade would have to be unsupported. Which is what I do on my 2008 Mac Pro Tower. It works well on that. That is my best machine right now. But I can't find much information for doing it on a MacBook Pro. I have an installer for macOS Catalina, and could install it, but I'm not sure how good the results would be. At the moment I don't think I want to mess with that, but it might be in the future.
Unfortunately I'm noticing a lot of slowness and issues with both my old MacBook Pros. The Core i5 processors seem to be choking a lot. I'm not sure they can handle unsupported upgrades. Which is too bad, because my 17" MPB has a fantastic display. YouTube videos upto 1080p HD look really good on it.
I wish I had grabbed Core i7 MacBook Pro a few years ago when they were in good supply. That would probably be a better machine to experiment with an upgrade on.
The upgrade would have to be unsupported. Which is what I do on my 2008 Mac Pro Tower. It works well on that. That is my best machine right now. But I can't find much information for doing it on a MacBook Pro. I have an installer for macOS Catalina, and could install it, but I'm not sure how good the results would be. At the moment I don't think I want to mess with that, but it might be in the future.
Unfortunately I'm noticing a lot of slowness and issues with both my old MacBook Pros. The Core i5 processors seem to be choking a lot. I'm not sure they can handle unsupported upgrades. Which is too bad, because my 17" MPB has a fantastic display. YouTube videos upto 1080p HD look really good on it.
I wish I had grabbed Core i7 MacBook Pro a few years ago when they were in good supply. That would probably be a better machine to experiment with an upgrade on.
Even though the HDDs they used in MacBooks and iMacs back in the late 2000s and early 2010s were actually really good, if yours is still using an HDD type storage, more than anything, that would be the primary suspect for performance degradation, imho.
If you haven't had them upgraded, try doing that if it makes financial sense to you but ultimately, the machines are probably too old to invest money in. Your call but I can't really offer any software advice on this as Macs are not my area.
Even though the HDDs they used in MacBooks and iMacs back in the late 2000s and early 2010s were actually really good, if yours is still using an HDD type storage, more than anything, that would be the primary suspect for performance degradation, imho.
If you haven't had them upgraded, try doing that if it makes financial sense to you but ultimately, the machines are probably too old to invest money in. Your call but I can't really offer any software advice on this as Macs are not my area.
I don't use any HDDs. Only SSDs, even in my desktop. I haven't used an HDD in over 5 years. Except in my oldest computer, but I haven't even turned that on in forever.
An update. YouTube is still blocking the video player at least once a day. Workarounds I have been using. 1. Restarting the browser, which automatically clears the cookies and then I can watch videos again, until they block me again. 2. Just opening the videos in incognito windows, allows me to view them. I can still use the YouTube interface. I can like, comment, subscribe, and all that, but I can only play videos in incognito windows. Ghostery Tracker Ad Blocker even gives me a popup window with a link to help me with that. To get that to work I had to allow all my extensions to open in incognito windows. Which is fine. It's just a PITA.
More disturbing though is that even with all my ad blockers enabled, random ads still pop up from time to time. I guess they are still trying to find some other ways to force ads past my ad blockers. It's a never ending game.
I don't use any HDDs. Only SSDs, even in my desktop. I haven't used an HDD in over 5 years. Except in my oldest computer, but I haven't even turned that on in forever.
That is good but they also have a shelf life and because they don't usually make it too obvious when they start going bad, they typically check out might fast.
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An update. YouTube is still blocking the video player at least once a day. Workarounds I have been using. 1. Restarting the browser, which automatically clears the cookies and then I can watch videos again, until they block me again. 2. Just opening the videos in incognito windows, allows me to view them. I can still use the YouTube interface. I can like, comment, subscribe, and all that, but I can only play videos in incognito windows. Ghostery Tracker Ad Blocker even gives me a popup window with a link to help me with that. To get that to work I had to allow all my extensions to open in incognito windows. Which is fine. It's just a PITA.
More disturbing though is that even with all my ad blockers enabled, random ads still pop up from time to time. I guess they are still trying to find some other ways to force ads past my ad blockers. It's a never ending game.
As I mentioned before, regardless of what browser you have installed, it is still running Safari engine which hasn't really seen any significant updates in the last 10 or 12 years, not the forget the similarly dated operating system itself that your old machine is rocking!
So, you are running a wrapper of a browser using a decade plus yo browser engine plus bunch of different extension that can help with something but can easily break the functionality/feature of something else on the page, inherently due to their design. So, I am not shocked and trying to fix something like this, one it is broken, may not always be feasible.
Ghostery is not a bad security extension but much like NoScipt and any other good security/privacy extension due to their functionality, they could cause problems on certain sites. When I say "problems", this is not necessarily a bad thing because the problem iow blocked functionality could very well be causing ads, pop-ups and cross domain data transfers that can be used for malicious purpose.
Anyhow, I digress but I will just suggest trying different extensions if you believe Ghostery might be causing the issue but if you haven't already, try experimenting with other extension of the same kind to see if things improved or not. This is one is the reasons why I like to keep minimum 3 different browsers on my machine at all times. Even if they are all Chromium based, just by configuring them differently plus using different extension (and one of them without ANY for testing only) and if I encounter any weirdness and clearly browser cache didn't help, checking the same site with different browsers is a smart and easy troubleshooting step.
For example:
MS Edge: with no extensions just using browser's own adblocker
Firefox: with just uBlock Origin
Brave or Opera: with Ghostery or Privacy Badger or Privacy Possum plus the browser's own adblocker
I ALWAYS disable the browser's "Continue running in the background" feature if it has one (MS Edge, Chrome and a few others have it) as well as the "Startup Boots" which allows the browser to add an entry in the startup (who knows why!). Not sure if their Mac versions actually have these settings but check and disable them if you see it under the settings.
I use both Microsoft edge and Googe Chrome. I use Ublock origin to block ads
Thanks, I had Ublock installed, but I uninstalled it a while back, because it was giving me problems. But i will try it again with my current situation. i'm ready to try anything.
I logged into my router and set the DNS to a free ad-blocking server. So far only one website that I visit detects that I'm blocking ads. Youtube has not detected it yet. Before a video YT tries to play 4 ads, but all I see is a black screen or a still shot of an ad, each lasting a few seconds. I use Firefox.
Thanks, I had Ublock installed, but I uninstalled it a while back, because it was giving me problems. But i will try it again with my current situation. i'm ready to try anything.
You are very welcome. Hopefully it works with no issues. I had never used it before until recently. So far, so good.
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