Ads ads ads everywhere. How do people actually live day-to-day with mobile browsers that have no true adblocking capability? Using mobile Chrome is like taking a stroll through a plague ward.

It’s, uh, really not that bad. I rarely notice banner ads and the like. If a particular site gets really egrigious, I leave the site.

I suspect that after using Adblock for years, your brain has forgotten how to ignore them.

We could make the same argument: you've spend years without adblock, and they have worn you down to the point where you accept active mental blocking of highly distracting ads. And even then you say sometimes it's bad enough for you to leave the site.

Why would you ever spend time on a site that did these things? Even if you have an adblocker, why would you use such a site on purpose?

I guess you got used to it. I also had the chance to re-discover how many ads are everywhere on the web thanks to firefox addons outage, and I was very surprised. Honestly, smartphones screen are already quite small (even more when the keyboard pops out) and with all the ads the actual useful surface of the screen gets ridiculously tiny.

I couldn't imagine that chrome on mobile doesn't have an way to block ads, and still has such a huge user base.

As for the "But how do we pay for all these free things then?" counterargument, I'd suggest voluntary restraint on the part of website creators. I can live with a few modest JPEG-only banner ads hosted directly from the site I'm visiting. If a site promises to not use animated images, streaming video, streaming audio, any sort of trackers, any sort of third-party content, and if they keep the screen-real-estate ratio of ads to content relatively low, then I'll whitelist them in a heartbeat.

I just don't think this is a workable model for most users. "You want me to do extra work so I can see some (admittedly nonintrusive) ads? No way, figure out your own business." Honestly, if I started using an adblocker I'm not sure I could force myself to make that effort per website.

I really wish uBlock Origin at least had the option to enable a blacklist model—ie, no sites ever have their ads blocked by default, but as soon as a site annoys me, I can go into my adblocker and disable their ads.

It effectively does have this capability. Just disable all the standard filter lists, and manually add one's own entries to the "my filters" section.

This method has the added benefit of enabling other useful privacy features that don't directly relate to display advertising, like killing off the nastiness of hyperlink auditing, CSP reports going to 3rd parties, prefetching, and remote fonts.

Yeah, I never understood why people purposefully visit sites full of ads and then complain that the sites they visit are full of ads. It seems like a pretty simple problem to solve. And yet, even among the tech crowd, people seem to struggle with it constantly.

I'd wish I had your ability to "rarely notice banner ads", but I don't, so I complain.

Again, not trying to convince anyone here, I just don't feel comfortable with it personally.

I hadn't heard of Fenix but it seems I'll have to try that soon.

I switched to Brave for mobile and it is amazing. Super easy to block scripts and other tracking without hijacking your DNS or requiring ad blockers/pi-holes etc.

Such is the reality of using an OS made by an advertising firm I guess.

EDIT: and there is no reason to use a different browser on the phone and desktop, Firefox is available on desktop too. :P

I used to have four adblockers on my laptop (two operating systems x 2 browsers), one on my smartphone, one on an additional smartphone I use... and how do I stop my TV and my ebook reader from serving me ads?

Pi-hole requires little to no maintenance, and offers a lot of benefit. Two people have purchased their first Raspberry Pis after I've slipped in "oh and BTW, no ads will load while you're connected to this network" after giving them a WiFi password.

But it doesn't work if you're using a VPN... So it's an either pi-hole or blokada situation

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/helpdesk/kb/articles/w...

Firefox has a desktop version too. Works well.