I knew I would get alternative browser recommendations because of my phrasing... but I was also looking forward to them!
From their website: "Better is hand-crafted by Small Technology Foundation, a tiny two-person-and-one-husky not-for-profit striving for social justice in the digital network age. We curate our own unique blocking rules for Better based on the principles of Ethical Design."
Nice app.
Be aware, Better actually allows most compact, low compute, non-tracking ads. Anyone who wants to serve me respectful ads that don't abuse my privacy or my compute resources are absolutely welcome on my system. Happy to help. Non-respectful ads are not welcome.
While I'm promoting small Indie browser extension makers, I also like the StopTheMadness extension. This kills lots of rude click/function hijacking that is done by many obnoxious web pages. It also stops a lot of tracking code. Again, I have no relationship with the developer.
https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/
Between the two of these, browsing becomes much less user hostile.
I joke but from what I know it is only available for Firefox and it either will soon stop working/does not work on Chrome.
There are a lot of reasonable choices, I've been using Wipr for years. It does a good job of blocking ads and costs about $2. There are macOS and iOS versions, they update their lists, and because of the architecture have no access to your browsing so can never be tempted to start farming you.
(No affiliation, I haven't done an extensive comparison, but this one works and isn't expensive and you can stop worrying about what to do if you do this now.)
For desktop & mobile: use something like nextdns/adguard or pihole & consider installing it on your home networks router.
(It’s been 2 years or so, for all I know, they have both advanced to the point of being sufficient alone - but I did not experiment, since everything just works so well)
It was also easier to install it on my parents' computers than to convince them to change browsers.
Give it a try if you want. It's free. https://ads-free.app/Ads-Free!%20Desktop/
Also has a neat broken site reporting system in it which automatically generates a GitHub issue to fix the filter lists from a simplified form. Automatically prioritises sites via an algorithm, probably their Alexa ranking or something similar.
https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/issues
I've found the issues get fixed pretty quickly too.
They've got an iOS app as well which integrates with the Safari content blocking system.
Use this for network wide blocking of all sorts of virtual garbage. Not only for safari, but all your locally connected devices.
'1block'[1] kills even the video-ads on yt for free. 'firefox focus' has built-in ad-blocking but does not get the yt-ads afaik.
i wonder if the the fact that the most popular ad-tech company also producing the most popular mobile os has something to do with it.
I have informed many of my technophile, uBO/ABP friends and colleagues that it’s possible, and not one of them was aware before I told them.
The reason I don't use uBlock is because I think that it's overkill for me to run thousands of filters for every website in the world. And also I like the fact that I'm in control of my user agent. For example recently I turned off feature on some website which paused video when I switched to another tab. I did not like that feature, so I disabled corresponding JS handler, simple as that.
In return you get thousands of lines of tracking and advertisement JavaScript running on your machine for almost every website in the world.
Is that better? ;)
Install this wonderful extension to save hours of your time and gigabytes of your bandwidth.