Only if you use their website. It's invested with ads and tracking. You can use a desktop client to play the stream in a native player and irc for the chat.

https://streamlink.github.io/streamlink-twitch-gui/

Not really. Twitch has been sending in-m3u8-playlist ad segments to clients like Streamlink for long a while now.

Streamlink's workaround is to avoid playing pre-roll ads by sniffing for SCTE35 segments in the playlist.

However, you can't just seamlessly skip ads. Twitch's servers won't send you the next segments of the actual stream until an appropriate amount of time has passed. What's an adblocker to do in that case? Show a blank screen?

If Twitch wanted to squash adblocking entirely, they could so easily do it.

>Show a blank screen?

yes? Isn't that what people did back then? eg. live sporting event, when the ads came on you went to go get snacks or the toilet. It's not ideal but it's still better than having commercial messages blasted into your consciousness.

Yep. That would be perfect time to reflect if you want to continue watching whatever you were watching, mediate or take a snack break or take the boiling water off the stove and throw some tea leaves in it or you name it.

They will never be successful with me. As soon as I see a pre-roll ad on Twitch I close the tab. Then I search for how to get around it and typically update uBlock Origin. Recently this happened regularly for about 2 weeks and then it stopped.

If they ever succeed I’ll just go elsewhere. I’m not spending one minute of my time getting brainwashed by ads.

I’ve also stopped Chrome from auto updating in anticipation of Google enforcing Manifest v3, which will cause uBlock Origin to break. That should give me enough time to figure out my next move.

This is a fun game for me :)

Instead of maintaining an out of date Chrome once that change rolls around, why not switch to Firefox?

I trust Mozilla way less than Google. They've never pulled a Mr. Robot (3rd party advertisement integration) or a Pocket (forced 3rd party extension integration) on me like Mozilla has. There are way more eyeballs on Google, so if they do something that I don't like - I'll know about it and how to fix it or work around it. I also don't like Mozilla's culture of political ideology at all. Finally, they had the swing vote for getting rid of WebSQL and they pushed that freaking piece of crap IndexedDB instead (among other bad decisions).

Beyond that, there are lots of things about Firefox that just annoy me. Off the top of my head - The search box being on the bottom and taking up the whole horizontal width of the view box, the inconsistent menus (context menu sub-menus fly out on hover, the program menu sub-menus do not), the boxy design and the native title bar which results in less vertical space. They only thing I'd want from Firefox would be containers - but I just use separate Chrome profiles to get the same effect.

I'm also a developer and I vastly prefer to use, test with and develop against something from the Chromium/Blink/WebKit lineage over Gecko. I want a mono-culture and to that end, I basically only test with Chrome and Safari. Everybody else can either keep up or die (or fork Chromium, customize it and maintain that). There's absolutely no problem with every Linux distro using the Linux kernel mono-culture, so why would there be a problem with a common browser engine/infrastructure mono-culture?

If I have to switch, I'd much rather go with something like Vivaldi or Brave. I doubt it will come to that though as I will probably only have to pause Chrome updates for a brief time while new extensions come out to keep blocking ads. The Manifest v3 limitation is in the number of rules (30k per extension) so I bet that each filter-list will just be it's own extension. There is no limitation on cosmetic filtering via injected JS.

Nah, we're winning now.

What's the current workaround? uBlock Origin isn't working for me and the earlier userscripts I saw were broken by Twitch

First was uBlock scriptlet patching window.fetch and replacing player_type=site with twitch_everywhere, facebook, embed, thunderdome, animated_thumbnails, dashboard. Every time took couple of days for twitch to patch it, including just saying fuck it and starting to play prerolls in the dashboard. Then extension .on webRequest.onBeforeSendHeaders to override user-agent

    Googlebot
    Mediapartners-Google
    LinkedInBot/1.0 (compatible; Mozilla/5.0; Apache-HttpClient +http://www.linkedin.com)

those also no longer work. Then someone discovered there arent any ads in the embeds so someone else wrote userscript replacing Video element with embed ;-) and finally we are back to patching webRequest to spoof being an embed.

All this cat and mouse will go away as soon as Chrome V3 manifest lands and kills blocking webRequest, because privacy or something (V3 still lets you spy on all webRequests, just not override them ...) :/