Windows Phone may allow you to get around the YouTube ad blocker via Chrome (sort of)

Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system hasn't been supported for years. However, an interesting trick involving Microsoft's mobile OS could help people view videos on YouTube without ads.

Back in August, we reported that Google was getting more aggressive with people who used adblockers to view videos on YouTube's website. In addition to a warning box letting people know they had to either watch ads on the site or pay for a YouTube Premium subscription, they also put in a countdown timer in the top right corner of the box, which showed how much time was left before an ad starts running on the site.

Well, the X (formerly Twitter) user known as "endermanch" posted up a note a few days ago (via Windows Central) that offers a possible solution for getting around the adblocker warning on YouTube's site. It involves downloading a user agent switcher extension for Chrome. There are a number of third-party switchers, and even Google has published one in the Chrome store.

Once you download and install the extension, people can then switch the user agent on Chrome to Windows Phone. Basically, it tells the YouTube site, when you browse your way to it, that your web browser is on Windows Phone. For some unknown reason, the YouTube site has put in an exception for browsing videos on Windows Phone and thus it should not show that adblocker warning.

It's likely that Google felt that since Windows Phone is pretty much a dead OS, it didn't need to configure the YouTube ad blocker to look for it. Of course, now that this user agent extension trick is out in the wild, Google may close this loophole pretty quickly. Having said that, it's still interesting that Windows Phone still has its uses years after its shutdown.