Hacker News Reader

Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

The other thing is that google analytics is on many adblockers lists, precisely for that reason. As adblockers are getting widespread, the analytics is going blind.

View on HN

I've been running a blocker to block GA and other junk on my PC, but I imagine I'm in a statistically insignificant minority. And I still can't block them on my iPhone unless I disable JavaScript entirely (though I'm running iOS 9, I'm not able to install a blocker for some reason; I guess Apple arbitrarily doesn't support them on my older iPhone model).

>I guess Apple arbitrarily doesn't support them on my older iPhone

It's not arbitrary - it requires a 64 bit CPU (of which Apple has now shipped 3 generations of).

Ah, is that the differentiator? I see. Still strikes me as somewhat arbitrary, though - is content blocking such a strenuous task that it requires a 64-bit CPU? Wouldn't using a blocker cause the CPU to do less work in most cases since it doesn't have to download so many ad media files or execute as much JavaScript?

Yeah, I guess it's just time to get a friggin' new phone already, but this one ain't broke yet, ya know?

If your device is jailbroken (not sure if there's a jailbreak for iOS 9), you could add entries for GA to its hosts file. I use these on my desktop PC:

  127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com
  127.0.0.1 google-analytics.com
  127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com

AFAIK ad blockers are only supported on iOS devices with 64 bit CPUs.

I could install an adblocker on iOS9, and you can customize the block list.

I don't think you are a minority. I understand adblocking usage is around 20%-ish now.

What I don't understand is people who use adblockers but still login to their google account on chrome. It sorts of defeat the purpose...

If anyone is looking for a good blocker for stuff like this, I recommend ghostery. I set it to block everything by default, and whitelist the few things I want. It doesn't block scripts served by the site you are on, so it doesn't totally break your browsing experience, like others do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com