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Comment by bberrry | Hacker News Reader

My number one reason for rooting my phone is blocking ads on a hosts-file level. It also stopped me from being able to play pokemon go, which I assume is for the best.

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Why not just use Firefox with uBlock? Or do you use a lot of free apps with ads that don't offer a pay for no ads option?

I find Chrome to be faster than Firefox with uBlock on my Android device.

Get Brave browser, it's based on Chrome and looks the same but has adblocker and some other good features.

Is it open source? If not, I wouldn't trust it.

Chrome isn't open source.

Sorry, I wanted to say it's based on Chromium not Chrome.

yes it is, from cofounder of Mozilla

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)

Sorry, I meant it's based on Chromium, which is open source unlike Chrome.

A lot of my phone browsing involves apps with built-in browsers (reddit, HN) so hosts-filter is more practical. Killing ads in free apps is definitely part of the equation as well. The one downside would be not being able to click sponsored links on atop Google when looking for a particular product.

IMO Hacker News works better without an app.

Most reddit apps let you open links in an external browser

I like the Materialistic app for browsing HN, it's really nice.

I like Hews, because I prefer serif font than Material UI

not-op here, but your question made me wonder: If you've paid for a freemium upgrade in an app that relies on Google's ad network, does that default to completely disabling the ads integration?

In other words, is the app still feeding data points into the ad network even though it may not be displaying ads? I had assumed it was, but your question makes me think otherwise.

Best to just block them, than rely on the skill/goodwill/giving-a-damn of the developer to not thrash all over your privacy.

just yesterday was checking many browsers, Firefox on Android is slow, was comparing loading times and it was very slow compared to Brave it RSBrowser or even Chrome plus no pull down to refresh is killer and there doesn't even seem to be plugin to add this only button or more fingers gesture or not just swipe down

on bright side on desktop i switched from chrome to Firefox and it seem ok, though it seem not so many pages are cached and need reload when switching many tabs

Firefox has a bug where first the tab takes ages to load. Open the same page in another app and see it fly

in the end I gave p even on desktop and I am back to Chrome, firefox just kept freezing or was unresponsive even with few tabs open, also always refreshing tabs when returning to them after while, while I experience no problems with Chrome :(

on Android I switched from YuBrowser to Brave browser, Firefox doesn't have simple pull down to refresh and it's not optimized for Snapdragon plus kinda slow in real life scenarios

If you have a Samsung Galaxy with Knox (S6+ I think), you can use Adhell which works without rooting and has all the capabilities of root adblock.

Wow! Thanks for this. Adhell is awesome.

But knox uses a Samsung owned proxy and send private identifying info to Samsung...

great choice (I do the same on my jailbroken iDevices.. my usual go-to hosts resource is: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

block responsibly :)

A non-root way: DNS66 via F-Droid.

https://github.com/julian-klode/dns66

How do you do this?

I rooted my HTC one, put hosts in /etc/ but somehow the phoen "ignores" it?

https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.adaway

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