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Comment by catacombs | Hacker News Reader

It's 2021. Who isn't using an ad blocker?

have been pressing this for around 15years meanwhile the percentage of adblock users actually got smaller.

i wonder if the the fact that the most popular ad-tech company also producing the most popular mobile os has something to do with it.

Does this number includes mobile browsers? Given the big mobile browsers do not have adblockers (or even extensions altogether?), that would explain it.

Mobile Safari has had content blockers for years.

And yet, surprisingly, almost no one is aware of it.

I have informed many of my technophile, uBO/ABP friends and colleagues that it’s possible, and not one of them was aware before I told them.

same here. then again a lot of "technophile" folks are in webdev and favor a vanilla browser experience.

pretty sure that mobile and the inclusion of masses of tech-unsavy users is responsible.

I don't use uBlock. But I learned how to write chrome extensions and it turned out extremely easy to insert my own CSS and JS snippets to the selected pages. So I just added few URL filters to remove most obnoxious tracking and ads, I added very few CSS edits to the selected websites to remove popups and I added some JS to youtube to remove its ads. Web is pretty fast and usable for me. I did not cut every ad, but I don't often browse new websites and I'm okay with some ads as long as they're not very bad.

The reason I don't use uBlock is because I think that it's overkill for me to run thousands of filters for every website in the world. And also I like the fact that I'm in control of my user agent. For example recently I turned off feature on some website which paused video when I switched to another tab. I did not like that feature, so I disabled corresponding JS handler, simple as that.

> The reason I don't use uBlock is because I think that it's overkill for me to run thousands of filters for every website in the world.

In return you get thousands of lines of tracking and advertisement JavaScript running on your machine for almost every website in the world.

Is that better? ;)

I don't use an ad blocker - I feel bad since ad revenue is the only thing most of these sites have (OTOH, I don't run ads on my own blog because I don't like what the ad-supported internet has become).

You should reconsider. Facebook made more than $80 billion in revenue, a majority of it through ads.

75% of internet users

And what percent of those are real humans?

Almost all of them I assume? Browser ad blocking is much less widespread than people seem to think, otherwise there wouldn't be so many ~trillion dollar companies built around tracking and advertising on the internet.

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