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Comment by cmckn | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, it depends on the screen. The submission makes it sound like the whole first page is ads, but there’s 4 ads at the top instead of the usual 2-3. It happens to extend to the fold in this Twitter user’s browser.

I scroll past all ads out of habit[0], so honestly this doesn’t impact my Google usage. Wish I didn’t have to train that muscle, but here we are. :(

[0] my pihole breaks the links anyway

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UBlock Origin - available on all major browsers, including iOS (er, this has adblock, but not uBlock in particular) and Android, my friend.

uBlock Origin available on iOS? Please explain!

Ah, my bad - though you can use many of the same block lists, iOS only has a concept of content blockers, so you have to use DNS Cloak with a content blocker. Or you can use Brave on iOS which has adblock.

Or you can run pihole and get DNS-level blocking for your entire network with no extensions/config on individual devices.

Also with pihole, you almost never run into the dreaded “it looks like you’re using ad block!”.

Can you also setup iOS to tunnel home so as to leverage your pihole DNS on mobile?

You could send your DNS queries over a VPN to your home network... but that’s pretty roundabout and will have a big performance hit. Instead you can just run a pihole-like DNS resolver on iOS directly. I like DNSCloak, which just runs dnscrypt-proxy under the hood.

As a pihole alternative, I highly recommend using dnscrypt-proxy. It can provide the same system/network level DNS ad blocking but it also ensures all your outgoing queries are encrypted and spread across different resolvers so no one can use your DNS activity to profile you. I also find the blocking/forwarding rules are more powerful than pihole’s.

That said, pihole or any DNS level blocking is pretty weak compared to what uBlock Origin and provide. Like a parent commenter said, it doesn’t prevent you from seeing the google ads, it just keeps the links from working. Most big sites know not to make their ads so easily blocked.

AdGuard though there’s some limitations on the number of rules.

AdGuard on your iOS devices and AdGuard DNS servers on your whole network is the key to ad-free bliss.

well, there’s https://1blocker.com/ anyway

It's sadly not available for the last few major releases of Safari on Mac.

DuckDuckGo privacy essentials works on Safari.

I was/would be okay with that but now you also get adds in-between organic results too

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