I Finally Installed an Ad Blocker | Hacker News Reader

I Finally Installed an Ad Blocker

css-irl.info

32 pointsheadalgorithm43 comments

How anyone used the internet without and adblocker AND script blocker is beyond me.

This is my hardware and I am going to control it.

Curious how do you browse the internet without scripts? I've heard people doing this for over a decade and even then it would render most of the internet unusable.

I've tried it a few times for couple of weeks at a time, and it is really difficult. I inevitably enable scripts after a few weeks.

It's just so tedious to do by hand, although it's nice to browse without jarring changes to the page as you load.

It would be great if there were some kind of community powered block list that adhered to some kind of standard. Probably easier said than done

uBlock Origin makes this pretty easy actually. You just have to enable the "I am an advanced user" checkbox in it's settings and it turns into a more user friendly NoScript, with an easy way to save settings for specific sites that require third party scripts or frames to function.

As the creator himself says, uBlock Origin is not just an ad blocker, it's a wide spectrum blocker.

I just have a plug-in that allows to disable us for a specific website

You allow scripts on sites that require them, as needed. Maybe you allow a few big domains like cloudfront.

Let's use CNN as an example. I load their mobile site with scripts blocked, and I see a menu with links that lead to mostly-broken news sections.

So I allow scripts from cnn.com, and the frontpage loads normally. The links work, and I can even see the puppy bowl headline's gif.

When I check which sites were blocked from loading JavaScript, there are 20 domains: ads-twitter.com, adsafeprotected.com, bounceexchange.com, casalemedia.com, cnn.io (probably okay?), cookielaw.org, etc...

Most modern sites have dependencies that don't really seem necessary. Social media, ad networks, telemetry...whatever those sites want to do, I don't really need it to read a news story.

For me, I just enable things piecemeal as I think a site is worth it.

I know there are people who maintain a browser profile with scripts enabled - for the Twitter's and Indeed's of the world that get upset if you don't have scripts on.

I once had the misfortune while travelling abroad for almost a year to have a monthly data quota of a mere 2 gigabytes. Calculate that out. It's only a miserable 60 megabytes a day.

When some web pages can be 2 or 3 megabytes EACH! due to all the crap (advertisements, mainly), it's easy to see that your whole internet bandwidth capabilities are horribly restricted. And more to the point, you're paying for those companies to restrict your overall usage.

I have always used an adblocker. I have most times also used a site-blocker. I have no apologies for doing so.

My machine, my money, my choices.

This what mostly got me into adblocking in the first place when Time-Warner started talking about data caps. I started with using a pac file, host file, and then mixed in a local proxy server. Aggressive DNS caching. I was hitting upwords of 60-70% cache hit ratio on the squid proxy server. In addition to the local cache from the browsers. My testing was a set of pages with cold cache took about 2-3 mins to load. After turning everything on it was in the 50-70 second range cold and 20-30 seconds warmed up. I was sold. Faster loading times, less ads, and possible future benefit of data caps coming into play.

These days it is mostly just ublock origin, and noscript. That is because everyone went aggressively towards https, less than 10% hit rate these days on squid. I could MITM the thing. But have not done it yet.

This is where hosts blocking comes in handy with portable devices. It's a shame this requires root access, mostly because banks and other apps like it's a sin to have admin access on your personal device.

I still travel on 3GB/month. I didn't realize it was such a constraint. Hell when I leave the EU I rarely use data at all.

In any case, Google Maps uses half of that data. Spotify uses a lot too. If I use OsmAnd for maps, I'm fine.

Most of my internet usage is casual browsing. When I'm offline I just read books and offline articles.

Same.

I actually used to have AdBlock Plus even though it’s inferior to uBlock origin. I honestly don’t care if all ads are blocked, and i still don’t care. But the issue was I started getting sites spammed with ads covering content even on AdBlock, as well as many sites adding an overlay which required me to explicitly disable ABP for the site (and ABP would keep forgetting my settings so i had to keep disabling it for the same sites).

I only care about blocking adverts that ruin the browser experience. Is there any adblocker that allows a user to select rules to allow/deny based on parameters such as load time, CPU usage and bandwidth ?

Why not just stop visiting sites with onerous ads?

I tend not to return, but how do I know in advance that a site will have onerous ads ? Also generally well behaved sites sometimes serve up terrible adverts.

"It might be unusual for a web developer, but up until recently I’d never had an ad blocker installed..."

This must be the understatement of the century...

I prefer adnaseum

We should punish the world being built upon ads. We need to be aggressors and go on the offense rather than passively blocking them

The drive for increasingly fine tuned ads is what destroyed our privacy at the corporate level. Then this data became ripe for the taking by government.

Ad networks are used to spread malware, suck of bandwidth the advertiser externalizes to you.

If you want people to pay for content - make content worth paying for.

And if we can't have social media bc the cost would be too much to bare without ad revenue? I consider this a problem solving itself. Adios.

Adnauseum clicks are easily filtered out by ad networks

But it forces them to spend resources on it, lowering their margin, which in turn prevents them from saving up a war chest of cash that allows them to stop innovating and just buy up newcomers (eg Facebook buying Whatsapp, Instagram, etc)

I doubt google is spending $billions on a script that filters bots.

As wev developers, we should still use the web without ad blockers sometimes (and on shitty phones and shitty monitors). That's how our users browse the web. When you see how terrible other websites are, you might be tempted to do something different, as a competitive advantage.

> I value rely on revenue from unobtrusive ads. I even have small ads on my own site

Perhaps some hypocrisy here?

You made one of the best decisions of your life.

Ask HN: what does everyone use for ad blocking on mobile?

Fwiw I'm on Android and use Chrome but curious for what people do

Firefox + uBlock Origin. Or any other browser with built-in ad blocking like Brave or Vivaldi, probably the best solution for non-techie friends or relatives.

And every other option is inferior. This is what prevents me from ever getting an iPhone.

The best uBlock feature is the Annoyances blocklist that remove many of the cookie banners.

Any DNS host blocker (there are several) for Chrome ads. Youtube Vanced for youtube ads. Firefox + ublock origin for the rest

Firefox on iOS does not have uBlock origin. What is a good alternative for Safari or Firefox on ios?

On iOS - 1Blocker + Safari (Including their local VPN), Duckduckgo browser and Brave browser.

I use 1Blocker with Safari for almost everything as Safari allows a default zoom of > 100%.

Firefox Focus app is a free browser and content blocker on iOS. Or Wipr content blocker.

I has used Chrome and AdGuard on Android that works as a VPN service and MITM TLS. It works but sometimes false positives happens and removing them is a bit annoying. Now I use Samsung browser and Content Blocker, because I found that Samsung browser is better UI than Chrome, and it supports content blocker as a bonus..

Firefox, µBlock Origin, and NoScript: the holy trinity. ;p

Just an FYI, NoScript is made largely redundant with uBlock Origin since if you enable the "I am an advanced user" checkbox in it's settings, it will allow you to selectively block or allow third party scripts and frames.

Firefox with uBlock Origin.

I just switched from Chrome to Brave. The HN hivemind tends to jump all over Brave with criticisms of their "attention token" monetization scheme, but this criticism has never made any sense to me. I just....don't use BAT, and never think about it at all.

If you are on iOS and Safari, AdGuard (free version) works perfectly fine

I use DNS66 and have done for a few years. Works really well with Chrome on Android. If you frequently use a VPN it means you need to remember to switch it back on.

I use Block Bear on my iPhone - came across it years ago and it seems to work reasonably well.

Block this, RethinkDNS, Invizible Pro, Blokada ...

Firefox + uOrigin, Blokada, Pihole

Blokada on Android.

I used Nextdns in the past.

1Blocker (iOS) and NextDNS.

brave browser

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