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Comment by Solvency | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone explain why there isn't a robust and thriving adblocking solution available at the router or OS level? Why are we all forced to grasp at the straws of the browser?

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DNS-based solutions do this somewhat.

But nearly all web traffic is encrypted. And without being able to inspect the traffic more closely ad block is quite limited. So DNS blocking or router firewalls have trouble. Pihole can’t block YouTube ads. The ads still come from the same domain as the video.

Extensions have access to the live page and can do much more inspection, with finer control over the page. (Manifest V3 limits this somewhat)

On iOS it can kinda happen at the “OS” level as there is only one web browser. But that has its own drawbacks. The only adblocks are those the AppStore allows.

There is in the sense that there are robust black lists you can put in your `/etc/hosts` file, but that only blocks known senders of advertisements. But how can your OS know that this `div` is an ad and that one is content? Since the browser is the authority on what is rendered on a web page, it makes sense that it is the tool that should be utilized to block/hide rendered elements.

If the ads are hosted from the same domain or even same IP as the main web content, this is hard to do. Done effectively, it's not possible to distinguish ads from the wanted content without inspecting the web content.

AdGuard is pretty good. but it's not free, and the browser extensions are.

With encrypted DNS queries becoming more popular, it is impossible to block something at the router level without decrypting the packets which bring up more privacy concerns.

Because most blocking is removing DOM elements and you can’t do this outside a browser

But the network still has to transfer the contents from some source into that DOM so I'm unclear why it's so hard to nix that inbound data.

Because it’s all encrypted and your router can’t decrypt it. That’s for your benefit

My guess is less variety on browsers than routers but no clue with OS’s.

Also, most consumers don't know how to configure their router. Most can figure out how to install an ad blocker.

Yeah, especially since ones like unlock origin are simple browser extensions that anyone can install in a few seconds. Hell it’s so simple I hesitate to even describe it as “installing”

Because you would need to Man-in-the-middle HTTPS.

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