The biggest benefit is definitely the sheer speed at which news websites load on my phone now, even when I'm on a crap connection.
Another benefit: This isn't a VPN, so you can still use a VPN whilst using Private DNS.
Edit: Also... lol, I can't access TFA as plausible.io is also blocked on my network and phone. I'm going to assume that the article is actually an analytics competitor whose pitch is "GA is blocked, use us instead!".
Edit 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=plausible.io Yes, assumption was correct.
Edit 3: NextDNS stats from my home network: 11.45% of DNS requests blocked, but from my phone 23.7% of DNS requests blocked. You need this more on your mobile than in a web browser!
If you want a DNS server to block things, know that the definition of what to block is subjective and some people may disagree with what you want to block.
For that reason you get an account, which allows you to have a configure, and that needs to be resolve to you... so at some level an identifier of the configuration is needed. This is the id.
On the other hand, it probably means that I am a "false negative" in TFA's report. I'd love to know the correlation between the server logs and what Plausible shows for a connection. I'd also like to know how they infer OS -- e.g. for privacy reasons, my reported user agent is not accurate...
You can see that in uBlock Origin already. The summary info has the number of domains connected and if you click on "more" you have the details, just like on desktop. You can also block JavaScript altogether for a particular site.
Works on ios and android.
I think their free tier is very generous at 300k lookups/month; otherwise it's something cheap like 2€/month if you want unlimited lookups (i use this to block tracking on all my devices + home network)
When I want to "try for free" I'm assigned a unique ID which is then used in all DNS resolution requests. How is that even remotely tracking-safe?
The unique id is to retain settings across different devices.
Of course you have to trust them not to sell you out.
Why would it use any extra battery? The phone has to make DNS lookups whether its with the one from nextDns or from the DHCP server.
You're right, this dns solution is very unobtrusive when it comes to energy use.
There may be an argument that Chrome is marginally faster than Firefox on desktop, and while this may also technically be true on mobile, it's completely dwarfed by the fact that Chrome is being asked render 5x as much crap (with animations and sound and video and nagbars and ...) compared to Firefox mobile with uBlock Origin.
You will literally regain hours of battery life. Those Joules belong to you -- don't just shrug and hand them to Google.
My Joules, my rules.
On iOS the options are a bit worse but Brave has some kind of adblocking that works. Safari also supports blocking lists via AdGuard but it's more limited.
The whole browser situation in iOS is really user unfriendly.
Sadly, I have a quite old Android device (but its battery life it's still good) where Chromium-based browsers are already quite slow and Firefox feels even slower and drains the battery faster (the old Fennec was worse than the new one, it hanged for 30 seconds).