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Comment by syrgian | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the summary. I had perceived the betrayal but I had never organized the thoughts nor verified the claims.

What do you think is the future (+2 years) for people with hatred for ads? For now I am using Firefox on computer + Kiwi in Android, but I also expect those two to go awry in the mid term.

* I see that after the edit, it doesn't look as bleak for Firefox PC. But what about Android?

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For Android, I don't have a great answer for you. In theory you can install Fennec on F-Droid, version 57, the last version the last version of Firefox built by F-Droid that was based on the Fennec browser engine, but that has security vuln potential, increasingly so since its been a few years since Fennec -> Fenix switch.

For now, because I don't want to be hit by security vulns in the browser itself, I'm holding my nose and doing plain old Firefox mobile, leaving some of the tracking stuff blocked on my Pi-Hole, then letting my wireguard VPN ensure that even when I'm off Wi-Fi, my signal gets routed to my home connection so the Pi-Hole can stop some of the telemetry (but not all! some gets through no doubt).

Why am I holding my nose there? Because my planned next browser, Iceraven [1], is not yet out of alpha and published to F-Droid. I check every 3 months or so, once it is, that's where I'm going, because it's as close as I can get to Firefox Desktop, but runs on Android.

[1] https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser

The latest Firefox for Android (104.1.0) has a limited set of add-ons available. One of those is uBlock Origin. Works out of the box.

Firefox Nightly for Android supports most desktop extensions. It is clunky to enable them (you have to create a collection and then subscribe to it) and being a nightly build it does have some instability, but it works out pretty well.

Only caveat I've really found is that it gets stuck on the Guardian's website (after a few clicks).

fennec is up to date on f-droid, currently version 104.something

You can install more extensions if you use Firefox Nightly:

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

It's not a clean experience and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone non-technical but I use this approach and it works fine, at least for the extensions I care about. There's also the caveat that you're running Firefox Nightly which usually is fine but has had big functionality bugs. I'd keep another browser installed as backup.

Hi, try Iceraven on android with a custom extension repo. They'll all install but are not guaranteed to work. I have most of those extensions working on Iceraven myself.

> What do you think is the future (+2 years) for people with hatred for ads?

DNS-based blocking

I don't know. I'm using it now in the form of pihole, but DoT/DoH with ESNI are coming, and we don't have a good way to ID and block them by their very nature, which is the bad edge of the double-edged sword that they enable.

The good edge is keeping ISPs etc. from messing with your DNS requests, but that sword cuts both ways as it also can lock your own home network out.

I don't understand what is it with DNS-based blocking people that they seem to be some of the most annoying proselytizers. Anyone remembers the "HOSTS file guy" from Slashdot ?

DNS-based blocking is as much a "future-proof" technology as "just don't look at the adverts". DNS-based blocking is old, easily workaroundable by anyone (just use the same domain name for everything, or interchangeable domain names, or just don't rely on system DNS), and significantly less featureful than even the simplest DOM/JS-based blocking (e.g. good luck collapsing ad elements from the view, getting Youtube not to play ads, etc.).

> DNS-based blocking

Google cracks down on VPN based adblockers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32636412

DNS based ad blocking is slightly different than VPN based blocking. VPN is there for people running environments where DoH is not yet supported.

Newer versions of iOS, Android and Windows support it already.

I think a hosted browser might be key to solving this. Something like Mighty (https://mightyapp.com) if it were self-hosted or somehow run by an org you could trust (or be run in some verifiably zero-trust way).

Until DoH becomes standard/required?

Firefox will not go awry, read the actual facts in this thread.

Which add-ons are you missing from Firefox for Android?

SingleFile

Old Reddit Redirect

User Agent Switcher

Click to find out what HN says (heh)

Fakespot

Absolute Enable Force Right Click and copy

Page Screenshot

SponsorBlock

Don't these run on Firefox nightly on android? You need to change some advanced settings, but according to [1] they should work.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

Parent asked about Firefox for Android. This functionality you mention is only available in Firefox Nightly, and even then it requires setting up a curated list on Mozilla's service to use it.

What's wrong with running Firefox nightly on android? I've been running it as my main browser for quite a while and have hardly experienced any breakage (maybe 2 or 3 times in the last 3 years).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32649895

The one I am missing the most is the multicontainer addon

Just install any adblocker that supports v3.

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