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Comment by ur-whale | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else having trouble with ads in archive.is links on mobile lately? They completely take over the page and cover all text after a few moments.

I've never used my phone for an archive.is link until your comment; I just clicked on the one above your comment on my phone (iPhone 15 Pro Max with yesterday's iOS 17.3 update).

What I got is vertical ads in the upper right and left hand columns and an ad below the article text, each of the three changing on their own to new ads after 15-20 seconds.

As I scrolled down to read the story, new ads appeared; at no time was any of the text obscured.

I never got a CAPTCHA.

Note: I'm not a techie and have NO ad blockers/VPNs/whatever on my phone, it's never been modded or anything.

Thanks for the extra data point! Mine will start as you describe, but every time the ads update, their elements seem to get appended instead of updating the existing ads. Then the browser kinda zooms in but won't let me zoom back out. After 30s I can't see any text lol. It's quite crazy.

A workaround for me was to request the desktop site, which actually looks the same. Then it works just like you described. Probably just a weird responsive web mobile Chrome zoom thingy.

I assume my phone browser is Safari as Apple's default; thus, web mobile Chrome is something that won't intersect with my phone unless I use the Chrome app, right? Asking for a TechnoDolt©®™ aka me.

It's been a while since I've been in hardcore web development, but it used to be that all browsers on ios used the same rendering engine. WebKit I think. I believe that's still the case!

sidenote: afaik ios employs vpn-light (private relay) by default for some online content, even more if the user pays for icloud+

Interesting. I do pay for iCloud+

I can't even get past the CAPTCHA.

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