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Comment by luckylion | Hacker News Reader

> I, as a technical person, can generally tell when a website's failing because of an adblocker false positive, and know how to fix it.

How often does that happen? I believe that most people will be fine if the occasional website breaks because the benefit of ad-free/ad-reduced surfing is so large.

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I find it's fairly common, especially with things like uBlock Origin that block privacy impacting stuff as well as advertisements.

Doubly so if you tend to use stuff like "Login with Facebook".

I've used unlock origin (with the default settings) for years, I literally can't think of a time when I turned it off to fix something.

Maybe it helps that I don't use "sign in with Facebook", but still, I use the internet a lot more heavily than most people.

I just had to turn it off about 5 minutes ago to pay my health insurance bill, as an example.

You must visit different sites than me then. It doesn't happen even on a yearly basis for me. The last time it happened was two years ago on my bank's website. And that was due to poor coding practices on their part

"And that was due to poor coding practices on their part"

Sure, you know that, but that's the point. The average user goes "that stupid extension broke my bank website and I had to hire someone for $150 to fix it".

I had a family member get soaked for thousands of dollars worth of Geek Squad "fixes" over stuff like this. We got her an iPad and she's been happy ever since.

IMO the obvious outcome is multiple devices for different functions. A stock device for banking etc. And then a weird thing you get from your nephew, who says it will track you less for general usage. If the latter doesn't work for something (or stops working altogether), you can always do it on the full-take device.

This will grow in popularity as ever more hardware becomes manufacturer EOL, but can be kept current with Ubuntu/Lineage/pmOS (etc).

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