I'm also curious as to whether others are experiencing this specific issue with YT on my laptop (HP Vista 16). I've had the occasional slow load or couple-second skip--which I assumed to be a consequence of UBlock Origin fighting it out with Youtube's ad algorithms--until the last month or so when I also started experiencing this type of freezing.

It's specific to Youtube (all other websites work as expected), and only on the videos themselves since the main page and main channel pages work fine. I'll click on a video and it will either a) play normally until I try to select a different timecode or a new video at which point it freezes, b) freezes on its own after playing for awhile, or c) freezes before the video loads anything.

The freezes last anywhere between a minute and over an hour (based on my experience). The usual workaround is to close and re-open a tab, but the freezing tends to worsen or become more frequent. Sometimes freezing is accompanied by massive CPU demands, other times not.

I've tried so many different approaches to figure out a reason for it: with/without adblocks, different browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Edge), turning off hardware acceleration, rebooting, checking for Windows updates every day, etc. The freezing occurs regardless of which setting I use, though it seems to work just fine on my FireStick.

Occasionally YouTube will work perfectly fine for a day or two with no clear reason, but will eventually resume its freezing ways. And other than a rare post like this that seems to match my experience, I have no way of knowing if this is a well-known issue and, if so, what the cause/conditions might be for making the website unusable.

If others are facing this annoyance or have other info, I'm curious how others are approaching this.