Like man, I always hear "so many people make their living on this" but uh, maybe if false advertising law is practically unenforced and most ads are practically usually lies pushed by the already established winners in their industry...

Which it certainly seems to be, then. I find it hard to feel too bad, especially when people in the advertising business are probably not going to end up street beggars if things suddenly changed.

edit: although that "makes a living" argument may go wayside a little with the inevitable AI-generated, focus-group tested future we'll be living in. Hmm.

Already have pihole on my home network and unlock on all non-iOS browsers.

Now I use youtube vanced, and as a bonus it includes sponsorblock that saves me a ton of time while I watch videos. It also plays videos while phone is locked, useful during jogs and working out.

Does anyone upload 360 or 180 videos on here?

If I have to trust someone, I trust the multi-trillion dollar company built on privacy. If they are found to be spying on people, the hit to the wealth of everyone who works there will be massive.

The catch for iOS is that you have to use Safari, unless the browser has an ad blocker built-in. It won't solve blog spam either.

This is bad why exactly?

and hamstrung browsers that are all basically Safari

Content blockers work in original Safari. Which part don’t you like? Content blockers as an app, safari itself, or inability to load third party js into every page you visit?

I wish PC browsers had something like that, because while I trust uBlock Origin (and others, e.g. Bitwarden), there’s always a chance someone hacks into their repo. Modular integration - separate Bitwarden and Adguard apps - is objectively better for these use cases than just pouring some javascripts into every website.

I just mean that 'content blockers' are a solution to a problem of Apple's own creation -

> Content blockers work in original Safari.

I know, what I mean there is that all the browsers on iOS are only superficially not Safari; which is the only reason 'content blockers' work in anything 'not' Safari.

Besides, if I care about my privacy, why would I want to use an ad blocker that has access to my web browsing history?

iOS content blockers tell Safari what to block and don’t have access to where you go.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/GeckoView

> Mozilla uses GeckoView to power Firefox for Android, Firefox Reality, Firefox Focus, and other Android apps. GeckoView serves a similar purpose to Android's built-in WebView, but it has its own APIs and is not a drop in replacement.

So the only way you can actually use your ad blocked system wide is through a series of hacks

https://github.com/bromite/bromite/blob/master/FAQ.md

That’s definitely a lot easier than just…going to the App Store.

Of course when your phone is using an OS that is created by an ad tech company, they aren’t going to make it easy to block ads system wide.

Its why it's important for folks like yourself who are pro-Apple to push for Apple to open up. That way we can have the best of both worlds (if you believe the marketing, like it would appear you do). I'll use the most open device at the end of the day.

You don’t just get a pop up that allows you to enable it. You have to go into settings and get a scary warning.

It works, so thanks. Maybe you're referring to the impossibility to access the plugin's settings from the embedded web view. But if it's a site you've visited before and configured to your preference, then it takes effect in the same way there as in full FF.

> iOS content blockers tell Safari what to block and don’t have access to where you go.

If I tell it 'block scripts from example.org on news.ycombinator.com' then it's a pretty good bet that I visit news.ycombinator.com.

Right, I realise iOS content blockers aren't that powerful, so it's hypothetical. ;)

Feel free to reproduce it yourself: block third party by default (for example), open some broken page, observe it as such; 'open in browser' from 3-dot menu; amend settings to allow whatever it needs; back out, observe it functional.

Did you also verify that Firefox installed from the App Store was the same as the open source version?

Are you using only open sourced code on your phone or are you using Google provided binaries? Are your drivers open source for your chipset?

If not, you are also using “locked down code”

Vote with your wallet and we can have a better future. I don't care if it's iOS, Android, or Linux! Just that it's actually open.

I assure you that Nvidia is not going to lose market share to Intel in the GPU race. Even Apple is creating chipsets Thad trounce Intel in graphics performance.

> Block Annoyances: blocks cookie notices

And if you really want to, you can run 1Blocker scripts within Safari that can do the same type of thing. You have to go into Settings and you get a huge privacy warning.

And this also works with embedded web views - unlike with Android

The problem with iOS' declarative blocking framework is that it's not powerful enough to deal with more advanced ads.

The fact that Windows 10 has zero protections WRT physical or app security is not something to be proud of.

It's an open platform, so of course there are a ton of bad actors in the space who are going to add their own garbage and try to prevent people from removing it, but if you buy a phone from a reputable source, it's going to let you put it into dev mode. Obviously don't buy the malware encrusted garbage sold directly from shady telecom companies etc.

Also you can change your DNS server permanently to an adblocking one like ControlD or NextDNS, iOS hilariously enough only allows this on a per-network basis.

Google Ad Premium disables google ads only (or most of them?), while other ad nets (avg more than 80 cookies on every major news site!) will continue to annoy.

I think people also underrate how much this varies. Our company has paid $50-$100 per click in the past for certain search terms.

Letting a CTO at a tech company opt out of ads for like $50 is a sucker deal for Google.

> if the user wins the auction, [a thank you message] is placed in the ad space, and the cost of the ad is deducted from the user's monthly contribution. If the user does not win, the winning ad is displayed as normal and the user pays nothing for that slot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor

So the common wisdom goes. Alternative thought: the more you’re willing to pay to not see ads the likelier you are to block them or never click on them, making you worth less as a target.

Examples: cable TV, Hulu, soon Netflix?

People that would realistically pay for the product - maybe 50M. I think a ~$10/m subscription could make sense.

The problem is - they probably need to offer something beside just being ad free. And I'm not sure what they could possibly add that wouldn't be better suited just improving the product for the other 99% of searchers.

I'd pay more than $10/m for Search if I had to. I pay for YouTube premium to get rid of the ads (and free YouTube Music). But I don't think the search ads are intrusive enough that I'm willing to pay $10 to get rid of them.

And its likely a Pareto curve too.

So a 99th percentile user could be worth $1000 per month, 99.9th percentile worth $10000 per month, etc.

I imagine they would only take the risk to offer such a premium service when they can figure out how to get everyone to upload their payslips and bank account statements.

Per quarter, no?