I started using the brave browser, which i noticed blocks alot of network requests. Loading the NYT took about 25 seconds to finish all requests using chrome. With brave it took 4 seconds. Also brave gives you the option to pay the sites you visit with BAT tokens, if you want. Brave in conjunction with Pi-hole looks like even more secure and perhaps further page load speed.

Edit: spelling

That's mostly what I use at home too. It works very well.

It doesn't quite work well while on the road sometimes. For those cases, I have a docker running diginc/pi-hole (with some additional hosts file blocking going on), then I point my laptops DNS towards that and am good to go.

Even better, replace pfsense with PF running on OpenBSD. Pi-Hole is awesome though, can't recommend it enough.

With PfSense you can block by country or ASN and avoid huge blocklists

This is pretty much my jam at home and away. Works great.