Hacker News Reader

Comment by keeganjw | Hacker News Reader

Anytime I need to use the browser on my phone, I'm shocked how bad and unusable the web is. I move back to my laptop with an ad blocker if I want to do anything other than a quick Google search. A few mainstream sites like Google and YouTube are alright, even if the ads are annoying, but most sites are just downright hostile to be on.

View on HN

It really is shocking as you said. I think every single time I try to use the web on my phone, I think “how did this happen?” … because it truly is unusable. I was trying to read an article about a game my friend and I were playing and it had so many popups/popovers/ads/bullshit/etc and the worse thing ever where the page was jumping all over the place as I was trying to read it (what’s happening here? Other content loading in? It can’t know where my phone screen is though?). So I literally gave up, wrote it off as basically impossible to use. Went to the computer with Firefox and ublock and read the page. Unbelievable.

I use Firefox on my phone for that purpose.

With the Ublockorigin add-on installed, I assume.

Imagine the bubble we live in at our house: everything, phone or otherwise, goes through the pi-hole. You can come to our house with your random phone or laptop, ad blocker or not, and you won't see ads, either, thanks to network-wide DNS blocking. And we both mostly WFH, and therefore rarely venture out into the wild, wild Internet outside of our home network.

And then I have to look something up while we're camping, expecting the same experience as I get every other day of the week, and...I would seriously curtail most of my non-work-based Internet use in a major way if that's what I had to put up with every day.

Me too, although in a sense I kinda like it because it makes me use my phone less.

Reddit is now completely unusable on a phone now unless you download the app, which I refuse to do. So I now spend far less time on Reddit, which has turned out to be a great choice.

Sometimes I wish that more of my favourite distractions had more friction, not less.

Unfortunately Reddit.com on Firefox with uBlock works fine.

Firefox mobile supports extensions, just throw ublock on there!

Not on iPhone…where Firefox is based on the iOS browsers and will not work with extensions..

https://nextdns.io/ or adguard-dns.io?

are you saying iphone users should use an adblocking DNS?

Just use Brave. Any possible philosophical blockers should slowly dissipate as you realize how awesome the web is with zero ads.

1Blocker is worth paying for, if you’re on iOS.

I'm not a fan of their token, but doesn't Brave Browser work on the iPhone, and is free?

(Use Firefox for Android, with uBlock Origin add-on.)

Most government websites are OK.

I have about a dozen sites I access on my phone outside home. I use pi-hole at home.

1. https://pi-hole.net/

Why don't you have an ad blocker on your phone's browser?

Why not install uBlock Origin on your phone? Works fine!

Why not install a content filter on your phone then?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com