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Comment by NeutralWanted | Hacker News Reader

Running Unbound on my gateway with a curated adblock list. Easy setup, network-wide ad blocking on every device / browser.

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DNS based adblockers have strictly worse adblocking capabilities than manifest v3 adblockers. I mean, sure they have their uses (eg. blocking ads/telemetry in apps or whatever), but bringing them up in this context doesn't really make sense.

I'd rather have 100% of devices on my network have near 90% of all ads effectively ad blocked than deal with installing ad blockers on all possible clients. Sure, I use an ad blocker on my personal machine with firefox, but none of the phones besides mine does. None of the family that visits do. Barely any of my friends that come over do. None of the TVs and streaming devices and whatnot do. I am blocking more ads from ever reaching my network than the majority of people who only use browser based adblockers do.

I'm surprised to hear that it's so successful beyond banner ads. I figured most platforms would use the same domain for their ads as their content. I'm pretty sure YouTube and my "smart" TV do that. Plus I'd prefer to use DNS over HTTPS instead of using unencrypted DNS.

> Plus I'd prefer to use DNS over HTTPS instead of using unencrypted DNS.

Running unbound or a pi-hole on your network doesn't preclude that.

Your devices talks to the gateway/router/pi-hole on the network, who will then use your chosen DoH providers for upstream requests.

Unbound uses DoH as the upstream provider. So in theory all my DNS traffic leaving my home network is always via DoH

I thought the whole issue with manifest v3 is that prevented extensions from being able to block connections? That DNS blocking is actual blocking, while the extension can only do filtering after the connections are made.

>I thought the whole issue with manifest v3 is that prevented extensions from being able to block connections?

No. See:

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/d...

>The chrome.declarativeNetRequest API is used to block or modify network requests by specifying declarative rules. This lets extensions modify network requests without intercepting them and viewing their content, thus providing more privacy.

They can block, it just has to be declarative unlike before. It's better than DNS adblockers since you can still do content filtering, CSS/JS injections and whatnot.

Some ads (e.g. I know YT ads used to be this way, haven't looked recently) can't be blocked at the network level because they are served from the same domain/servers as the content.

Sure, but have YT Premium for the family. Don't know how anyone can use YT without it. And it blocks 90% of ads, the rest are tolerable / go mostly unnoticed.

>Don't know how anyone can use YT without it.

With an adblocker..

Why would you need yt premium with an adblocker?

I use uBlock Origin on my Windows, macOS, and Android versions of Firefox but I also pay for YT Premium. It means I can use the official YouTube client on my Android devices without ads. I get YouTube Music. The creators I watch get a share of my monthly fee.

The funniest part of this is that you're paying to still see 10% of the ads. I use Firefox and see 0% of the ads for free

Reading comprehension? I don't see any ads with YT premium. That's the whole point. Plus you get YTM. Great that FF works for you (I also use FF), but I, nor my family sees any ads on any of our PCs, Phones, TVs etc. YT premium is stupid cheap for what it provides.

I use a browser with a built-in blocker (Brave Origin) and I don't see ads in YouTube.

Same with ublock origin on firefox, been years since I've seen any ads. There was a period where they tried to break through the blocking and occasionally I'd see one, but it kinda seems like they gave up.

> Don't know how anyone can use YT without it.

It's easy, we use FF :-)

So do I. Now get YT without ads on everything that's not a PC

> So do I. Now get YT without ads on everything that's not a PC

I use FF on my phone, tablet and TV too :-/

You’re just saying that 90% of your internet usage is YouTube?

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