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Comment by marssaxman | Hacker News Reader

Firefox + uBlock Origin works well for me! It's all I use.

Ditto except NextDNS as default on my network for DNS blocking.

I can switch to cloudflare DNS in Firefox to circumvent DNS routing which is occasionally necessary, mostly to make email links work.

NextDNS does not work many a times. I prefer the iOS app so that it’s easy to disable when needed, but the app has not been updated for a few years. Many a times the test page at test.nextdns.io will show as unconfigured and sometimes it will show as passing the test.

On Apple TV, I have the NextDNS profile installed, but it still doesn’t work.

Most of the community forum posts on NextDNS don’t get any answers. I’m sure the DNS servers exist, but the clients and the configuration options have not been supported by the creators.

I wouldn’t recommend NextDNS to anyone because of this apathy by its creators.

NextDNS was working a treat for me, and it was only through NextDNS's meticulous logging that I immediately discovered that my consumer grade router was hopelessly compromised: joined a botnet, trafficking porn, IDK.

So I threw the router out the window, and signed up to rent CPE from my ISP; edge router security is now 100% their responsibility!

What’s a CPE?

It's an networking term to distinguish between ISP-owned and customer-owned equipment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer-premises_equipment

minor nitpick, but it's not ownership so much as location. Sometimes the ISP will own the equipment, but it will be located on the customer premises rather than the ISP premises. It's an important distinction as you can't just rock up and do stuff to it.

NextDNS is definitely worth the money. Setting up profiles for your kids devices is very useful functionality as well.

In addition to that, I use EFF's Privacy Badger

https://www.eff.org/pages/privacy-badger

The ublock origin FAQ recommends not using additional content blockers or you may run into effectiveness/detection problems.

I've never had the former happen, but it's something to be aware of.

afaik there's nothing ublock doesn't block (or can't block with an extra filter or two) that Privacy Badger does, sorta redundant

I had a pihole for a while, but found ublock was more reliable. Occasionally the dns routing to 127.0.0.1 would wreck havoc on "Smart" devices, such as firetv etc

The same addon, but prefer Ungoogled Chromium as browser. Chrome, Firefox, Brave etc. have too many features I never asked for.

I just use Firefox and disable Pocket, search suggestions, and everything on the new tab page and it feels fine to me.

Same, but discovered a nice alternative Firefox fork recently: Floorp

https://github.com/Floorp-Projects/Floorp

https://floorp.app/

Also checkout the Mullvad browser which I believe is based on the Tor browser with the Tor bit removed. (You dont need the Mullvad vpn to use it).

https://mullvad.net/en/browser

Floorp is great! Also discovered it recently. Works really well.

Found out 1Password doesn't work in this, so it killed my plan to switch to it. Currently using Brave, which seems like the next best choice.

I do that plus adguard dns hosted on my local network and I use their paid dns on my phones when remote.

Brave browser + uBlock Origin is still great for a Chromium-flavored experience too.

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