PurchaseWithPurpose

That's true but the DDG browser does not support extensions for Windows, Mac, iOS, or Android, so when you use it, you get what you get.

For Youtube viewing, the DDG browser is absolutely better than nothing, but speaking for myself YT is so shitty now that extensions are the only thing that make it watchable.

For me it's not just the ads, it's also being able to permanently filter out any channel that I never want to see again, blocking the sidebar and all its right-wing propaganda, blocking comments, etc.

Maybe it wouldn't be such a big deal for me but a few years ago YT suddenly decided, based on nothing in reality that I personally know of, that all I wanted to see were zit popping videos. I do have history turned off, so who knows. Maybe it was a young relative, maybe I'd left my mouse on the wrong thing for too long, but jeeeeezus fucking christ I'd be eating dinner and change the video and suddenly a thumbnail of somebody with fucking Krakatoa about to explode off their face would be in the sidebar, one of many. A column of angry looking boils, blackheads, abscesses, more zit pics than a dermatologist's waiting room, all ready to blow. I'd arrange another window over the sidebar to watch the main video visually unmolested, but then I'd have to bring it forward to change it, and YT's like, "What, you don't like these? Here are even MORE we're sure you'll like!"

Hell to the fucking NO. So no extensions = no YouTube is how I roll now. No exceptions.

I've had good luck with uBlock Origin on both Firefox forks and Vivaldi for YT watching: they both support extensions, and though you have to use uBlock Origin Lite on chromium-based Vivaldi, that combined with Vivaldi's built in adblocking does the job and gives a perfect YT experience for me.