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Comment by M_Grey | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: How many people are left without some form of ad-blocking? It seems to have become incredibly ubiquitous, and when malicious ads aren't teaching people to go and get it, loud and obnoxious ads are.

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Mobile users. There just aren't any pleasant ad free browser experiences for stock mobile phone users. Firefox for Android is quite poor and fixing through chrome requires root, something most users are not going to be doing

Firefox for Android works quite nicely, in my experience -- better as a browser than mobile Chrome, which surprised me as I had little faith in Mozilla's products before trying it. And installing uBlock Origin was a trivial matter of downloading it from the app store. It really couldn't have been easier unless it came from the factory already installed that way.

My guess is that you have a higher end phone. I have a Moto-G and tried to use Firefox, but it was noticeably slower than Chrome, annoyingly so. Had to switch back.

Do you have Marshmallow? Firefox was almost unusable with the number of crashes I had on Lollipop. I upgraded recently and haven't had a crash since. Performance is much smoother as well.

I couldn't give up background video/music, reader mode and the extensibility I get with firefox over Chrome now.

I have heard good things about block-this, which creates a VPN connection that just strips out ads, but it seems (unscientifically, because Android doesn't track VPN battery usage) a battery suck.

yeah and it collects those ad avoiding users' data easier than any conent network could. way to go. I mean, that's what I'd suspect.

Uh. It's open source. I built it from source myself.

wat. that wasn't obvious from the comment.

Google "block-this". First result: "Block This - Open Source Ad Blocker".

Yes, sure, I am going to search something on the off chance of it being an open source project, because someone on the internet said it, who doesn't even go with the good practice of including a link. Or, you know, I could express myself, inform you of the impression you've left on me, and provoke the answer to read for anyone, instead of finding it for myself. I'll admit in hindsight, either approach seems somewhat improvable.

I use AdBlock on my iPhone with Safari and it's seamless (even though it's AdBlock and I'd much prefer uBlock)

AdBlock didn't block enough ads for me. Currently I use Eluo, but I'm not 100% satisfied with it: it tends to block more ads, but it can be trickier to whitelist sites and the UI isn't quite polished and full-featured.

Edit: All content blockers either end up breaking sites or not blocking enough ads or both, it seems. Be prepared to long-press the refresh button on iOS to reload the page without Content Blockers if something breaks and you need quick access. See also, a list of iOS content blockers reviewed late last year at https://brooksreview.net/2015/12/content-blockers/

AdBlock currently blocks enough ads for me, although I keep my mobile browsing pretty restrained to forums and utilities. No broken sites and nothing I can recall in terms of ads either.

I was finding Google ads and ads on The Verge, particularly at the bottom of articles, weren't getting blocked. YMMV, of course, and this was about 8 months ago. Oh -- I think I may have found the relevant setting: "Allow some nonintrusive ads" I don't think I discovered that checkbox months ago.

Theres Adguard for Android, which installs itself as a local VPN:

https://adguard.com/en/adguard-android/install.html#howToIns...

It seems to be reasonably low on the scum scale as far as Android apps and ad blockers in general go.

I use Focus by Mozilla with iOS Safari. It does a decent enough job. Not sure if there's an Android analogue.

Does Focus actually block ads? All of the settings seem to concern trackers, not ads.

I found Focus did a poor job. I switched to Adguard[1] and have found it quite a bit better.

[1]: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adguard-adblock-privacy-prot...

Seconded for Adguard. I've tried several others blockers, such as Blockr (which don't update their filters often enough), to something more all encompassing like Weblock (which creates a proxy link and filters at the system level); ended up breaking a lot of things like App store downloads and updates.

This is also brings weird bias to page visits. For a number of technical keywords in my ads, virtually all clicks are from mobile devices, but from organic search only around 10%.

I see, and that makes sense. Thanks for the reply.

I've found Firefox for Android quite excellent, especially because of Firefox Sync between it and laptops.

I pipe all my reading into Pocket, which does a great job of stripping the ads out.

I don't have any data beyond what a web search would get you, but from past reports I have seen, somewhere between 20% and 40% of web users block ads.

I use an ad blocker on my desktop but not on mobile.

I don't use an ad blocker. I just avoid using websites that are covered in ads unless I really need to.

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