Tell HN: Chrome says "suspicious download" when trying to download yt-dlp
by joering2 on 3/31/2026, 3:20:11 PM
On a newest version, I attempted to download newest yt-dlp only to be warned of "Suspicious Download". No explanation what that means was provided.
Comments
by: asveikau
The heuristics powering this, as well as the Windows Defender whitelisting, are terrible.<p>My understanding is that a specific binary needs to become popular for it to stop being flagged. This creates a chicken and egg problem. Users are not incentivized to use the program with the warning. But removing the warning requires many people to ignore the warning.<p>This is a big problem for anyone writing Windows software. An indie developer or small open source project is not going to do well with this.
3/31/2026, 4:27:37 PM
by: john_strinlai
for what it is worth, when downloading the latest .exe from github, firefox says "this file is not commonly downloaded" and i have to select "allow download".<p>scans of it are fine.<p>probably just a heuristic-based false-positive, and not a news-worthy story of chrome abusing their monopoly or whatever.
3/31/2026, 3:54:29 PM
by: cvhc
I can reproduce when downloading <a href="https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/download/2026.03.17/yt-dlp_win_x86.zip" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/download/2026.03.1...</a>. But it did provide a line of explanation:<p>Dangerous download blocked yt-dlp_win_x86.zip is not commonly downloaded and may be dangerous. [Discard] [Keep]
3/31/2026, 5:35:09 PM
by: jddecker
The binaries they offer are complied using PyInstaller, which can give false positives in anti virus software.
3/31/2026, 3:43:02 PM
by: alsetmusic
Reminds me of how Bing search for Google takes people to a page meant to resemble Google.com. Can't trust huge companies.<p>But as others have pointed out, it's probably a coincidence in this case. But who knows.
3/31/2026, 4:12:12 PM
by: faangguyindia
It's funny such a big corporations can't let such a small tool live.<p>Google is such an evil company, it is not even provided anything great anymore.<p>Anti-gravity paid plans suck, GCP is billing heavy. Today google sucks at most things<p>Their Android playstore hardly updates statistics once a day, so much for such a big data company with unlimited sources lol
3/31/2026, 4:21:03 PM
by: throwaway85825
Clear conflict of interest enabled by anti trust not being enforced.
3/31/2026, 4:43:19 PM
by: ompogUe
So, Google's browser says downloading a tool to download files from Google's servers is "Suspicious"? Not surprising.
3/31/2026, 3:31:23 PM
by: matheusmoreira
Which is why I download it from my Linux distribution's package manager. It's available on Termux too.
3/31/2026, 3:45:35 PM
by: jesse23
`brew install yt-dlp` or `scoop install yt-dlp` :)
3/31/2026, 4:13:04 PM
by: ddtaylor
Linux user here unaffected as I get it straight from my command line.
3/31/2026, 4:34:44 PM
by: uoaei
Chrome and YouTube are both owned by Google. There's an obvious reason why they want to discourage use of that extension.
3/31/2026, 5:57:02 PM
by: eis
Which link exactly did you try to use? Or what specific version on the Github releases page? I checked both the latest windows and macos versions against Google Safe Browsing and all were fine.
3/31/2026, 3:43:23 PM
by: NiloCK
Interesting to inspect any telemetry on this. Could end up on a list.
3/31/2026, 3:58:34 PM
by: nnevatie
You wouldn't download a downloader.
3/31/2026, 4:41:46 PM
by: waffletower
Chrome for work, Safari or Arc for everything else. I envy you if your use of yt-dlp is work related.
3/31/2026, 3:50:42 PM
by: sleepybrett
break this shit up, break all of this shit up.<p>Google needs to be at least what four companies.. gcp, youtube, search, workspaces...<p>Apple needs to be at least two hardware/os, music/tv+<p>Microsoft, meta, etc, Monopolies are bad and our SEC/FTC/Government is doing a poor job of controlling them. At least as equally trecherous are these businesses that overly vertically integrate... anyways, we're fucked.
3/31/2026, 4:37:30 PM
by: rdevilla
It's over. The internet culture of the 20th and early 21st century has been appropriated for profit.
3/31/2026, 3:42:28 PM