YouTube video title not shown in Chrome history with AdBlock Plus

[13h]

Environment

ABP 1.13.5
Chromium 64.0.3282.140 on Ubuntu

How to reproduce

1. View YouTube video with AdBlock Plus enabled.
2. View another video with ABP disabled
3. chrome://history

Observed behaviour

The history entry for the video when AdBlock Plus was enabled is missing the video title dynamically generated by the page, instead the title is "YouTube", making it impossible to tell from the history which video was watched.

ABP is likely blocking something that prevents the dynamic title being written to the history.

Expected behaviour

Full YouTube title is written to history.

[arthur]

Which filter lists are you using?

[13h]

The default lists. The issue is not reproducible with uBlock Origin.

[arthur]

The default lists differ from the actual browser locale (when installing ABP). I was unable to reproduce it with EasyList and Acceptable Ads enabled (on Windows using Chrome).

[13h]

en-US locale

[13h]

Youtube Chrome history item with adblock plus enabled

[greiner]

Unfortuantely, I cannot reproduce this issue so would you mind providing more detailed steps? YouTube tends to implement things in strange ways so depending on how you navigate to a video, YouTube renders the page differently which makes it difficult to reproduce.

For instance:

1. Go to ​https://www.youtube.com/
2. Search for "AAA"
3. Click on first video in search results
4. Click on Adblock Plus icon in toolbar
5. Click on "Enabled for this site"
6. Close Adblock Plus icon popup
7. Search for "BBB"
8. Click on first video in search results
9. Go to chrome://history

[13h]

1. With AdBlock plus enabled, visit ​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVYtzF5SemU

Look at the history item for the video, notice the title is just "YouTube" (e.g. https://issues.adblockplus.org/attachment/ticket/6379/abp_yt_hist.png).

2. Disable AdBlock plus on YT, and watch another video such as ​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNdIdSX-g6M

Look at the history item for the video viewed when AdBlock is disabled on YT. The history shows the full page title as it should (https://issues.adblockplus.org/attachment/ticket/6379/yt_title.png).

Expected: History always shows full YT page title

Actual: History only shows full YT page title when ABP is disabled on YT.
i.e. something with ABP is blocking the full page title being written to browser history.

[greiner]

I can reproduce what you're stating but note that I'm seeing the same behavior even after disabling Adblock Plus via chrome://extensions/. The first video I'm opening is always missing the title while the second one is not. Can you verify that?
Therefore it looks like a browser caching issue to me that is unrelated to Adblock Plus.

Here's my explanation of what I think is going on:
YouTube's initial title is "YouTube" and they dynamically update the title only after the page has finished loading. That means that the browser may only record the page's initial title in the history since it thinks the page is complete.

If you're opening the second video by clicking on a link on YouTube, it merely swaps out the video, the URL and the title which means that the browse can accurately record the new page's title.
If, however, you open the second video on its own (e.g. by closing the first video and opening the second one in a new tab) its title, again, will be only "YouTube".

[13h]

Can you check with ABP if subsequent YT pages have the dynamic title?
I observed with ABP enabled it never seems to load the page title.

[greiner]

Replying to 13h:

Can you check with ABP if subsequent YT pages have the dynamic title?

The question is rather whether there's a way this issue could be avoided and for that I'd suggest to report this to YouTube directly. The Chrome team may also be able to help (e.g. by updating the title in the history whenever the page title changes) but that may be premature since this appears to be something that's caused by YouTube's page loading mechanism.

Presumably, it may happen more often when an ad blocker is active because the page might take a few milliseconds longer to load.

I observed with ABP enabled it never seems to load the page title.

Do you also experience missing titles when Adblock Plus is completely disabled? At least that's what I encountered.

[13h]

Replying to greiner:

Do you also experience missing titles when Adblock Plus is completely disabled? At least that's what I encountered.

Yes, I sometimes experience it with the first page, then after that it loads the titles.