Using a HOSTS file to block things while effective, is also a very bad user experience.

For example, some sites won't let you in until you unblock ads. With an extension you can use the in-browser UI to whitelist that site, with a HOSTS file you'd have to figure out exactly which domains got blocked, then update the HOSTS file, and finally restart the browser & flush the DNS Cache Resolver for it to take effect.

Again, it works, it is just a bad user experience.

Even simpler solution: never visit those offending sites again, which is a great user experience ;)

And that's why I haven't seen a forbes article in a long time.

> is also a very bad user experience

I think I'll be the judge of that, given that I'm the "user" in this "experience" ;) It works just fine for me.

You can't recommend your solution to others and then say that they can't judge whether or not it is a good solution.

This is also the purpose of using DNS management like Umbrella from OpenDNS, which has been serving me very well. It catches most malware sites, and I can add in my own whitelist, blacklists. I did get a bit overzealous and add a cdn once that caused a ruckus, but besides that, one by one blocking ad networks based on which ones generate the most traffic is not only keeping my bandwidth cleaner but makes parsing through dns logs much easier.

I use this source, which seems to be a pretty good aggregation of several hosts file sources: https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

Instead of hosts file, use dnsmasq that support wilcard extensions. See FreeContributor [1]

[1] https://github.com/tbds/FreeContributor