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Comment by arkades | Hacker News Reader

I got an ad overlay from the top of my screen, a growing banner from the bottom, and a fade-in pop-up over that. Within five seconds of loading the page, precisely 0% of it remained unobscured.

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Serious question: Why do you browse the web without an ad blocker? I can't imagine subjecting myself to that kind of torture.

Why should I? I don't bother, that way I know which sites to not visit because they can't put together a usable website. If I go out of my way to force their site to be useable then they see they get traffic while doing such things instead of learning not to, or going out of business.

> Why should I?

To reduce the risk of malware delivered via your browser?

uBO shows you what it has blocked on each site. So you can see which sites would subject you to ads without actually having to expose yourself to the psychological terror of seeing those ads.

It also blocks things that you don't see (tracking), improves performance and prevents malware infections.

Edit: Replies are far more informed than I am. I'm using Firefox on Android for the reasons outlined in my original comment, preserved below

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> Serious question: Why do you browse the web without an ad blocker? I can't imagine subjecting myself to that kind of torture.

As best as I know: doing this on mobile (assuming that's their platform) requires both:

* a non-iOS device (Android basically)

* a non-Chromium browser on said device (Firefox basically)

That pairing is the only reason I can adblock on mobile. Not sure if things changed on Chrome or related browsers on Android, but as best as I remember, iOS and Android+Chrome aren't adblock-friendly.

On iOS, there's AdGuard if you want to use Safari, and Firefox Focus if you don't.

Firefox focus blocks ads in Safari too. Any content blocker will work in Safari, as far as I know.

FWIW, I use firefox focus in Firefox in iOS, and it didn’t stop one of the things the parent mentioned.

NextDNS works really nicely on OS/Apps. Also blocks ad/tracking content in iOS. It's actually quite easy to roll this yourself, which I intend to: wireguard+pihole.

would need to subject oneself to the pushy notifications, whims of Brendan Eich, and the dubious approach of the BAT cryptocurrency [1], but the Chromium based Brave browser on Android has a built in ad-blocker.

I think Opera might have one too.

[1] <https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-br...>

If I am not wrong, don't Brave and Vivaldi (Chromium browsers) have inbuilt ad blocking?

You are not wrong, I'm using Vivaldi on Android and it has built-in ad blocker. On this page though are two big dialogs: for cookies on top and "2 free stories remaining" on bottom, so even with ad blocker only 1/3 of the screen is visible until you manually remove these annoyances.

> a non-Chromium browser on said device (Firefox basically)

Mmmm. I can use Adblock in Edge Beta on Android.

I turned off adblock to check, this is madness. 2 slide ins (top & bottom) for upselling their paid subscriptions, instantly another overlay sliding in on the top about cookies, scrolling down just to try to bring the content up darkens the screen with another overlay asking for newsletter signup, briefly followed by a slide in from the right promoting some other product. All before seeing a single word of article content. If anybody every tells me using adblock would be unethical, this is my new goto site why I think the opposite.

I love newsletter signup modals.

Always use "legal@oracle.com"

edit: now I recommend privacy@chevron.com

That's the beauty of using Firefox + uBlock Origin on both your computer and non-ios mobile - you will completely avoid these kind of irritating annoyances, experience quicker loading and more responsive websites and save a lot of bandwidth. (On ios AdGuard does the same but is limited because of Safari. Google is also working to cripple ad-blocking on Chrome, so Firefox is currently the best browser to comprehensively avoid such ad-infestation and trackers online).

I’ve been using 1Blocker on Mac and iOS for years and every once in a great while I have it disabled temporarily and can’t believe people what people have to deal with where everything is covered in ads. Every once in a while some feature on a site doesn’t work so I click disable content blockers for that one page temporarily then all is good or can always just open up chrome for a particular site on those rare occasions.

I’m using AdGuard on iOS. Whereas 1Blocker only allows one type of filtering to be active at a time in the free version, AdGuard can block many things in Safari on iOS for free. Ads, trackers, social widgets, annoyances. All blocked for free by AdGuard.

It's shocking how borderline unusable websites can be. And it's all google ads.

1Blocker isn't even good, hasn't blocked YouTube ads for months now.

I regret paying for it.

I moved to Wipr after being disappointed by changes in 1Blocker.

Simply turn off Javascript and watch instantly all inaccessible pages become accessible with all ads and popups gone. The magic. The 90s HTML page.

I recently put NoScript into a less-trust mode and manually enable sites and links if a webpage I want is broken.

It is pretty amazing to auto-bypass paywalls, and how much faster sites load, that you can see how many external JavaScript sources there are on every site by default.

It’s a little annoying when I realize that X or Y page doesn’t look or work right and need to adjust, then reload, maybe a couple times, but overall worth it! Magic is right.

Indeed. Fortunately, umatrix exists and is very helpful – I turned off cookies and scripts for the page, and all was good.

For me the whole page is just some kind of abstract image captioned "MS Tech" with a tiny shred of the actual article at the bottom of my screen.

Yay. 2 free stories remaining.

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