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Comment by jasondclinton | Hacker News Reader

This isn't any better on the NYTimes mobile site. Everyone should be running Firefox for Android with uBlock extension enabled. Bonus: it reduces the network traffic so dramatically, it's like getting a new phone.

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I used to be conflicted about using ad blockers on sites I frequent and enjoy and used to actively maintain my block list. After all, I want them to earn money.

But almost all websites are getting out of control and I no longer have the time and energy to do that. So Firefox+uBlock all the way

>But almost all websites are getting out of control

And they don't care if you're a paying user! I susbcribed to the NYT, paying them fair money every month for a couple of years now, just to be subjected to the same mess regardless. It's infuriating. Why should I even pay for the service when they still bombard me with ads and tracking?!

Yet that's just how all newspapers traditionally operate, you pay for delivery of their advertising platform.

I used to feel that way too, until I got redirected to scam "you won an ipad" sites from mainstream sites I respected. They served me a bad ad, so I blocked and never looked back. Who knows how many times they silently tried to serve me malware?

I use uBlock + privacy badger, so I whitelist some sites on uBlock. That way I will see those ads, but still block trackers

I use Firefox Focus. It's great for things like reading news articles because there no tabs. Just one page at a time. It has built-in tracker blocking but doesn't support extensions like ublock.

Normal Firefox for iOS with "Strict" setting enabled in the "Tracking Protection" section of Firefox's in-app settings menu reduces nytimes.com advertisements on the front page for me to basically 0. In my experience, it's just as good as Firefox Focus for blocking trackers and ads.

I use both on iOS. I generally open in Focus because it actually tends to be stricter. I find that if I open something in Focus I can, from there open in Firefox if blocking is too strict and sometimes it works. Another plus to using Focus, if a site is completely broken, I can just disable all blocking and not worry much about it because nothing gets persisted when I leave and blocking is automatically re-enabled the next time around.

Same workflow is pretty much possible without it, but it does make ephemeral browsing a bit easier.

I've been using Bromite on Android which is Chromium with ad blocking and Google services stripped out.

It's been flawless for me since I installed it. The maintainer is a user on here but I don't remember who.

https://github.com/bromite/bromite

Something like DNS66 is a good idea too:

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.jak_linux.dns66/

AMP sucks, but it seems it might be a good idea for some of these request-heavy websites

There are ways to incentivize sites to reduce bloat without asking them to use some Google-specific format.

HTML is really all you need to reduce requests though. You don’t need AMP. Obligatory motherfuckingwebsite.com and bestmotherfuckingwebsite.com links.

You can make fast, light-weight websites without AMP. In fact, it's easier to make a fast, light-weight website than to make the modern request-heavy monstrosities you see today.

Just stop using 20 trackers and 10 ad networks, and stop loading so many parts of your page asynchronously. A news article should require zero JavaScript.

Of course you can

But tell that to the hundred-tracking-cookies-js-bloat website with the ridiculous "We care about your privacy" popup

If AMP cuts that crap from the website, I'll go to the AMP version, thank you.

Agreed.

To users, AMP is a godsend that greatly enhances the user experience.

I will happily use AMP pages. Web developers brought this on themselves with ridiculous amounts of JS code.

I prefer using a browser on Android that has integrated ad blocking with no extension needed. As with ad blocking extensions, browsing becomes lightening fast.

I like it the other way around.

Ublock origin uses public, transparent, editable block lists, I can not say the same about built-in ones and browser vendors could always have ulterior motives, be strongarmed into whitelisting exceptions and so on.

Regarding battery/bandwidth consumption on mobile, Brave is better even with Firefox + uBlock Origin combined.

[0]: https://brave.com/brave-saves-batteries/

[1] : https://brave.com/brave-one-dot-zero-performance-methodology...

Brave on android also broadcasts your phone model in the user agent, unlike FF. They've said they would fix this and then let the GitHub issue languish for at least a year at this point.

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/7758

Even if that's true. Providing only sources from one of the competitors in question doesn't make your argument.

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