Most people don’t.

Most people who use anything for iOS tend to use things like:

- 1Blocker - super full featured, including custom script and css rules. business model is paid software, not ‘acceptable ads’ paying them for placement or third parties paying for your data

- AdGuard Pro - Similar to 1Blocker, less custom config friendly

- https://nextdns.io/ - pihole type blocker with unlimited configurations, custom rules, and analytics, native hooks for devices

- https://adguard-dns.io/ - similar DNS[1] service to nextdns.io with ability to upload your own rules based configurations

- Firefox Focus if using that ecosystem

- Brave if using that ecosystem

- iCab Mobile if wanting a super configurable browser with filter rules and longest history as indie browser for iOS

Folks also use ancillary quieters such as:

- Hiya - call / sms blocking

- Hushed - throwaway numbers for spam SMS

- - -

1. Note that the AdGuard public DNS server including custom DNS filtering rules has just (26 August 2022) gone open source: https://adguard.com/en/blog/adguard-dns-2-0-goes-open-source...

“Most people” don’t have a clue what any of those things are.

The only non-tech people I know who have any of what you mentioned only have it because I installed it for them.

> Most people who use anything for iOS tend to use

OP cited U-Block Origin and Firefox, so I’m replying to them as a persona, the sort of person that would use something, with things that can help them.

The broader point is to share a clue.

The key thing that most people in tech don't appear to grok very easily is that the overwhelming majority of web services like search engines, social media, ad-driven news websites, etc are all things that users place practically zero value on. People accept ads because they're a way of paying for things without really thinking about it. If you start asking users for actual money they suddenly decide that all these services represent no value and they'll live without them.

The end of online advertising is an existential threat for a massive part of the tech industry. If that cash cow ends there would be a huge reduction in money for devs, and a massive flood of devs on to the market. Economics 101 should tell you how bad that would be for most HN readers.

Maybe we should ask users for money because the alternative has become some kafkaesque hellscape where people think it's totally normal to have a dozen ad trackers when attempting to buy shoes. These trackers have an enormous costs and maybe their externalities should be taxed and regulated.

Maybe by the end of the century we will slowly realize that online advertising is the "lead" paint that was rightfully eradicated.

And when people _are_ shopping around, they search for things like "best vpn providers 2022" and then go to that article and look at the breakdown. People don't click on B unless they're already sold on it, and search placement just isn't doing it for people anymore because the ad results have just been so bad for so long all trust is gone.

The modern populace has become completely innoculated against the effectiveness of search ads imo. Most people don't even see those results they have mental blinders and scroll down a bit.

The point is that advertising won't end until the formula of additional_ad_driven_revenue > ad_costs becomes false. And we're a long ways away from that given how inordinately expensive advertising is relative to the costs incurred by the companies selling the advertising. And each time that equilibrium price goes lower, the potential market of advertisers who may purchase ads grows.

This logic suggests that, if anything, advertising will get even worse as ad revenues decline. Go low enough and we'll be right back to square one with Google Ads promoting big dick pills and viagra. That's to say nothing of the fact that as revenues decline, both Google and advertisers will be looking for ever more insidious and forceful ways to make you watch and make you consume. Imagine, for instance, the countless dystopias things like Google Nest could enable - if such products ever managed to gain widespread adoption.

Which coincidentally a number of VPN "review" sites were purchased and the lists "updated" to recommend a certain owner that I'm fairly certain at this point is a honeypot.

https://restoreprivacy.com/kape-technologies-owns-expressvpn...

https://www.techradar.com/news/pc-mag-owner-j2-global-buys-s...

Kape Technologies was formerly known as Crossrider before it was acquired by Teddy Sagi, an Israeli billionaire that has spent time in jail for insider trading. Crossrider itself never had that great a reputation itself, what with their primary product being a development platform through which they were frequently used by third parties to invade ad platforms to serve up malware.

Imagine a world where the only content that survives is the one that people value enough to pay for.

What a wonderful catastrophic disruptive event that would be. Imagine no more SEO spam which are essentially devoid of information. These which are already so plentiful and sophisticated that they are threatening the core value of online search. No more vacuous blogspam, low-quality trash "newspapers" that only survive because they trick people into giving them a few morsels of attention.

Imagine a human-curated web.

Or that the creators value enough to create for free.

The OG Yahoo! was ahead of its time?

Somewhere, somebody is saying, "Maybe we shouldn't sell drugs to children?" And somebody else is saying, "Won't somebody think of the wages for chemists?"

She wouldn't mind losing her job if it meant that income taxes went away.

That's as may be, but little of value would be lost IMHO.

Well, except by those supporting (in a myriad of ways) the cesspit of advertising online and elsewhere.

I'm sure many will disagree with my assessment, but advertising as it's done today is invasive, obnoxious and alarmingly ubiquitous.

I'm not sure what a better model is, but this is not the way.

N.B: Advertising paid for my food, clothing, housing, etc. for the first 18 years of my life. And a couple years later for another five years as well.

One leads to the other easily. For example taking advertising money for television commercials or magazine adds leads to "Native Ads". Native ads are sort of like product placement except that it's pretending to be a news story or whatever.

Like when people on CNBC or CNN start talking about Taco Bell menu items or new type of drug that might fight cholesterol. That's paid-for propaganda that is pretending to be television news.

Pretty soon you have a entire industry based on not telling the truth about drugs or food or other products they buy because that will piss off their advertisers.

This is the basis of the modern web. It's not a good thing even though it makes a lot of people a lot of money.

> If you start asking users for actual money they suddenly decide that all these services represent no value and they'll live without them.

So what you're saying is if we use ad blocking technology to kill off the advertising business model, we can also kill off social media and its addictive algorithms, clickbaiting sites that generate and monetize outrage and numerous other cancers on society that the advertisers enable.

Ad blocking is now a moral imperative.

Ads are keeping the whole IT industry as a hostage. Even Startpage, the last ad-free search engine I used to use (and one of the oldest on the market), has recently been purchased by an ads company. They've put their filthy hands everywhere, innovation today only happens if it benefits ads revenue, and most of the bleeding edge innovation in AI comes to solve the problem "how can I maximize the odds that users will click on an ad I put in front of their eyes?". What's worse, a lot of development time nowadays is spent either to develop new ways to block ads, or new ways to evade those blockers, instead of focusing engineering resources on things that are actually useful to society.

Ads are a curse to the industry and they have to die. And I really don't give a fuck if it will cause developer wages to go down. They'll go down only in companies that have relied only on ads and data surveillance to build their revenue, and I've always stayed away from those. Developers will have a chance of moving to companies that can pay them better and have more sustainable business models, once Google and Facebook will no longer be the coolest kids in town. Two decades down the line, and not only we haven't yet figured out a better way to make money through the Web, but the ads industry HAS BECOME the Web. We need a fucking reboot and we need it now.

At some point people will start to understand that they need to either pay for services, or host them themselves, and maybe they'll be more selective on what they use and who they send their data to. If I want service A, I pay for service A (like things work in every other industry), or I run it on my own server. I don't rely on someone who allegedly provides me service A for free, just to scoop out as much data about me as possible and resell it to opaque 3rd-parties so they can place more targeted ads in front of my eyes that I'm more likely to click. How the hell did we end up so tangled up in this grotesque and creepy shit that now we are unable even of conceiving an IT industry that doesn't rely on ads?

If the ad-supported model fell apart, people would eventual change their understanding of the value of those services. They'd probably pay a decent amount for it.

But its a race to the bottom since someone will always offer ad-supported. It'll take an outside force (like ad-blocks by default or bans by governments) to actually kill off the ad-supported industry.

I would not pay $0.50 for any walled garden social media account; I don't even have any with them being free. They are just too intrusive and too limited.

Good. Things would be rough for many of us here but it is the better outcome for wider humanity. Advertising and adtech normalise abusive psychological manipulation.

I wonder if that’s the truth or if it’s this way because there are free alternatives.

If one search engine starts charging a monthly fee, users will just go to another one that pays for itself with ads and data.

But if the prevalent model for search engines is monthly subscription, then people will start paying for it and the value for the user won’t be 0 anymore.

Why would you pay for ice cream from the ice cream stand if you can get it for free next door for the “cost” of them keeping track of how often you come to the stand and what flavors you like, and selling that info to others?

Far more likely ISPs will start providing search engines included in the cost of that service. Old ISPs like AOL and CompuServe did this in the past. Social media will never be something people have to pay for because we've already seen that people will create their own forums for free so we'd just go back to that. Hell, back in the day people paid for additional phone lines and hardware to host their own BBS which users accessed for free and that cost the sysop a hell of a lot more than webhosting these days.

I think there's chicken and egg problem here -- users aren't going to use micropayments until there's a widely used micropayments platform that is also privacy protecting. I have no desire in using a micropayments platform that's really a cross-platform analytics engine that's even more invasive than Google since they can positively identify me through my payment method.

I have no problem paying for content, but don't want to pay through intrusive ad views, and don't to use a micropayments platform that tracks all of my browsing throughout the web.

Well, the problem is that there are no rules, morals, or code of conduit telling when it's too much, except for users leaving. In theory. However, unfortunately, most users adapt very easily to being thrown at their face more and more advertising every day, so we can't count on them. Just look at what advertising became since the late 90s until today: the number of ads and wasted bandwidth/storage/cpu cycles employed to send and show them grows every damn day, why should I think it's going to stop? For a while we thought that flashing banners were the root of all evil, but what about short articles ridiculously split in multiple pages so that they can show more ads at each 5 sentences ..er.. page change? Or articles altered (possibly by AI) so that they use like 3 times the necessary words so they become longer and can be split like the above? Or unskippable ads during videos, user profiling that is becoming so dangerously close to digital surveillance, etc. Just no thanks.

I wouldn't mind opening my adblockers if sites kept advertising to a reasonable minimum in which I can get some information about where to purchase a product I'm interested in: actually I want good non invasive advertising, but every time I tried to do that I quickly had to get back in disgust and set them tight closed again for almost all sites, save for the very few ones that still do the right thing: what once was a short blacklist transitioned over time to a nearly empty whitelist.

I have no trust in the system anymore. Until the day there are well defined and enforced rules, it will always keep choosing what brings more profits, that is, more and more advertising. Not holding my breath for that day.

Also, I think the current economic system would need some heavy modifications to adapt it to micropayments on a large scale for every service one could access to. What would be the expenses of a micropayments system that, say, charged one cent for daily usage of every now free or ad supported service out there? (Google, blogs, social media, etc). I mean, that would produce a huge number of extremely low value transactions; are we sure it wouldn't cost more than the profits it should produce?

Then why did we build them? This seems like a massive waste of effort.

Please cite sources backing up your original claim.

There was a short period where it seemed like it would happen - context aware ads, links and affiliate products, each page was served different ads or none at all, with no privacy stuff it could also be very effetive.

Alas general ads won, and they do make more money for the platforms since they can show the same ads for stuff you have already bought/installed.

You say that like it's a bad thing. If an industry relies on the abuse of their "customers" for survival, that industry needs to go.

Or, more likely, change their business model to be less abusive.

Google et al in adspace winning is mankind losing. Not hugely, but its clearly there. But the amount of mental gymnastics elite devs have to go through every day to keep feeling OK about their jobs just because of huge paycheck or working on 'cool' problems' is staggering (ignoring how screwing fellow human beings isn't cool in any way for now).

A little sidenote - not an expert on psychology, but it seems to me practically every human being, including psychopathic mass murderers have this desperate desire to feel OK with their actions, the need to justify them so they are at peace with themselves. If I kill, I follow the word of god. If I burn jews and minorities alive in concentration camps, I am just following orders and doing it for greater good of my nation. If I work in amoral company, 1 man doesn't matter anyway, there are tons of others that would happily pick up the job, and look at what open source and cool free apps we give to the world for this little cost of privacy and annoyment. Or I just do it so my kids have better starting position, I am great parent and that s above anything else. Whatever the mental tool, always aiming for the same destination.

Unable to profit from online advertising, what do "tech" companies do next. Are there any other commercial uses for surveillance and data collection.

But OP was talking about U-Block Origin so they’re not in that 95%.

Customized adblocking DNS servers?

This is definitely striking me as one of those "why didn't I think of that" and "why don't we already have a lot of this?" Any ideas? Seems like you could go wild with this and do something like "Tor"ify, or "torrentify" or dare I say "blockchain" it?

Someone can probably school me on why this is harder than it sounds.

The reports an dynamic modifications to rule sets are a big advantage of pi hole. Sure, you can do it with dnsmasq conf files and logs, but the web UI has a lot of niceties.

https://hub.docker.com/r/pihole/pihole/

I used synology's docker app. I had to enter the port numbers into their web GUI manually.

I run a PiHole in the cloud so I can PiHole my phone without exposing my home network at all.

EDIT: On my phone, I do use Firefox with uBlock Origin, but the PiHole blocks ads that aren't in the browser, or use an app's browser view.

What I'm talking about is publicly usable adblocking DNS servers. As in instead of me at home having to install anything, just (probably clear a cache or something) and change all my DNS servers to a public reachable-by-anyone DNS server. No installation.

They do also have their own paid DNS service, but I haven't attempted to use it. Might be a way to deal with mobile better.

You do need a reasonable upload speed to do this, though. Otherwise I guess you could use an "always free" VM at Oracle or something.

This reads like a hint at AdBlock Plus, not uBlock. Or did I miss some controversy there?

GP’s comment was asking about normal people who browse the internet without adblockers on any device.

Citation needed.

You probably meant "Most people I know".

In my case, I browse a limited number of web sites that offer no ads (or a minimum amount). The moment I visit a web site with tons of ads, I just close it immediately and just ignore my original intention of visiting that website (e.g., this happens sometimes in HN: people link websites of newspapers, but I don't last in them more than 2 seconds)

People don't browse, they app.

Which makes Firefox the obviously better mobile browser, Chrome seems like a pretty strong case of defaults' power. Tho gotta add the "Google Search Fixer" select addon because they sure doesn't want you to get summary cards, financial charts and other goodies if you use a competitor browser.

Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and co without the ads circus. Duolingo without daily activity limit for some reason.

All the big names quietly or publicly abandoned their efforts to fully migrate to React Native, focusing only on the most simple use-cases/views if they do keep it around. Even with the smartest people working on it, it's tough to keep React Native performant.

It's just that most apps people use are pretty much the same as their respective websites. All of FAAMG's websites work as perfectly fine replacement to the apps, even better, IMHO, when you get rid of the ads apparatus.

I have a little-used gmail account that I registered a few years ago, as my original gmail became completely overrun with spam and I switched to Fastmail.

I added a credit card to the account and tried to pay for Youtube Premium and was immediately flagged for suspicious activity. To reactivate my account, Google wants me to verify my identity with photos of goverment ID and a full KYC-style form.

No thanks. I signed up for https://nebula.app/ instead - they were able to process my payment on the first attempt.

A potential problem they're trying to prevent might be where money launderers use google accounts to funnel YT Premium money to specific channels via watch time (since Premium pays out a lot more, and pay per minute watched[0]).

0: https://youtu.be/Rh5hL47z2us?t=100

On Android you can simply install an alternate YT client, boom, job's done. Works on Android TV also.

On iOS, the content blocker lists in Safari can block YT ads, but there's no way to block them in Google's YouTube app unless you jailbreak and install a modified app. So just watch YT in Safari.

https://www.paprikaapp.com/

It's worth it to avoid all the bullshit blogspam, even without the ATK rating and reviews (which are super useful on their own as well).

There was a time where you could just close the tab if it was that bad, but now pretty much all websites are like this so there's no choice.

Enable the uBlock "annoyances" filters to staunch the tide of popups.

[0] https://github.com/mozilla/readability/#isprobablyreaderable...

If I have to wait for all the ads and banners and fonts to load anyway, most of the benefits of reader mode are removed.

You are right about all the rest.

You don't /need/ them if you only have essential cookies:

> At GitHub, we want to protect developer privacy, and we find cookie banners quite irritating, so we decided to look for a solution. After a brief search, we found one: just don’t use any non-essential cookies. Pretty simple, really.

https://github.blog/2020-12-17-no-cookie-for-you/

"only"? No, they are here because you use non-essential cookies AND regulation says you must ask visitors about them.

There is no need for pop ups under the gdpr. If you are handling personal information, giving cookies etc which aren’t required (E.g to sign in), then ask at the point of signing in/up. Otherwise you don’t need to set cookies, you might want to, to track and monetise your visitors, but that’s different.

There are many cases where what publications consider "essential" for their business do not match what the EU has decided is "essential".

Heck, when GDPR was first proposed most publishers assumed advertising would be allowed under "essential" business uses since they can't provide content if they don't get paid. Clarification on this only came a couple of months before GDPR enforcement started, causing a bit of a scramble for publishers and advertisers.

If you want to track unique users, well, you're not supposed to unless the users opt in (not avoid opting out!), and you have to accept that at least a part won't - the society and law has decided such desires are not legitimate unless the data subjects themselves want that.

Those are legitimate cookies for which you don’t need to ask an authorization.

> How are you supposed to count unique users that visit your site?

https://plausible.io/blog/google-analytics-cookies#how-can-p...

> These are legitimate questions a publisher may want to know to improve their site, but are not allowed under GDPR without a specific notice and opt-out.

Why would the publisher’s questions be legitimate and the user’s right not to be tracked no? You can still answer those questions but you need to ask for permission. A physical store owner has also a lot of questions but they’re not allowed to follow you everywhere in the store and in the street.

> Heck, when GDPR was first proposed most publishers assumed advertising would be allowed under "essential" business uses since they can't provide content if they don't get paid.

That’s a really weird reasoning. Should drug dealers be exempted from police controls because their activity is essential for their income and so for their life? Earning money is necessary, but there are multiple ways to do so.

You're not supposed to A/B test at all. Users are not test subjects.

> How are you supposed to count unique users that visit your site? How are you supposed to figure out why most users bounce?

You're not supposed to. You simply aren't entitled to any of that information.

> These are legitimate questions a publisher may want to know to improve their site

It doesn't matter how "legitimate" it is or how much money it costs publishers. The attempt to learn these facts requires collecting identifying information and that is harmful to us.

The least you can do is ask permission.

> There are many cases where what publications consider "essential" for their business do not match what the EU has decided is "essential".

That's by design. Nobody really cares what an industry that's being regulated thinks. Obviously adtech considers it "essential" to collect as much personal data as humanly possible.

What matters is what society thinks and we think sites work just fine with all the tracking disabled.

> publishers assumed advertising would be allowed under "essential" business uses

Advertising is allowed. It's just the abusive adtech model of targeted advertising that requires consent. Nothing stops people from signing a deal with some brand and serving static images or something. As long as it's not surveillance capitalism it's fine.

EU Directive 2009/136/EC

It applies to the legislatures of member states, which I believe doesn't yet include the USA.

Perhaps the clause you are thinking of is this one:

"(33) Customers should be informed of their rights with respect to the use of their personal information in subscriber directories and in particular of the purpose or purposes of such directories, as well as their right, free of charge, not to be included in a public subscriber directory, as provided for in Directive 2002/58/EC"

That directive doesn't call for a mist of popups to flash before your eyes before you can read content. It could easily be satisfied by a menu option that allows you to set your preferences. The mist of popups is caused by a bunch of angry data traders who don't care how much they annoy their users.

Incidentally, citing a directive from 2009 is a bit anachronistic: that directive is overridden by the GDPR.

Tracking cookies are not mandatory. You are not obligated to present cookie banner: you can simply drop nonessential cookies.

Your business problems aren't our concern. If you're financing your business by stealing personal information from users and selling it to data brokers, then you're a crook. Crooks tend to have high hosting expenses.

The only website that you know I use is this one. Are you saying that you run HN? I do not think you are that person.

If that's not the site you're referring to, I'm rather curious to know what site it is that you run, that's had 100m users since 2004(!), that can correlate a site user with this HN user. Will you tell, please?

And yes, your expenses aren't our problem. Don't run a website if you can't pay for it.

I don't have much sympathy for your predicament. Perhaps the market has a better use for your hosting facility than pumping out ads and tracking scripts.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/targeted-ads-offer-little-...

The ad networks get a lot more for tracking based ads, and the advertisers supposedly get more conversions (though targeting fraud is a real, well-documented thing).

If following the requirements of society makes your business unprofitable, too bad, having a business is optional, following the requirements of society is not.

Correct. I've only run a handful of websites in my life, but not one of them has ever served ads.

I believe they are a protest by largely US-owned companies against regulation, designed to annoy internet users and turn them against regulation.

Even if this is true, it's something that should have been expected by EU legislators. Their beliefs seem to be that companies are acting in bad faith by secretly tracking users and misusing the information that they gather (basically true), and also that if they impose vague rules that companies need to get consent for tracking then they'll act in good faith and give users clear and convenient ways of opting out (ha ha ha).

If I look at the changes implemented by local telecommunications companies, local banks, local supermarket loyalty programs, local pizza delivery chains, local real estate brokers, etc - these types of businesses had all kinds of widespread shenanigans before GDPR, but now they overwhelmingly have acted in good faith, and have given users clear and convenient ways of opting out (because, really, they didn't have a choice). Like, we don't see EU phone carriers selling location data to advertisers the way they do in USA - now that is a significant thing compared to some blog putting on a cookie.

For most companies, the transition has happened reasonably well - it's just that a few (but large and highly visible) global companies are holding out because of political reasons preventing enforcement - mostly stemming the fact that Ireland's DPA is currently permitted to unilaterally shield them from the rest of EU and has motivation to do it because it's financially beneficial for Ireland to have Facebook/Google/etc have their EU domicile be in Ireland.

It has been - the regulation explicitly outlaws such malicious pseudo-compliance. The problem is that GDPR enforcement has been severely lacking, so malicious actors are allowed to run free.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/cre...

Initial content blocker support came with iOS 9 in 2015. They only work in Safari, maybe also other browsers (not sure though).

The position is usually something along the lines of:

- They ignore the incredibly invasive tracking/profiling/security risks involved with downloading and running malicious third-party unvetted ad code

- It's stealing if you block ads

- Micropayments/subscriptions just don't work well enough

Also, while not an ad blocker, Hush helps reclaim a bit of sanity regarding all these nagging GRPR/cookies "privacy" popups.

From what I know, it never will as long as Apple only allows shitty request inspection with allow/deny result. It just cannot work nowhere near as well as uBlock Origin.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/saf...

Adguard’s blocking is quite potent I.e. YouTube ads don’t play

Basically at a high level it's like what DNT should have been i.e "as a default don't track me since I'm not giving consent"

Update: On first impression that does not seem to have worked.

I also find it annoying that I lose access to my entire Firefox ecosystem on my computer and phone since the focus of the app is actually on anonymous browsing versus blocking ads. If I send tabs to my iPad they still open up in regular Firefox. Firefox Focus only slightly makes the web useable, while giving up most of the browser conveniences.

Can you give an example of a website that breaks with an adblocker? (Please describe what breaks as well. Otherwise I might not notice it.)

Now that I think about it, if a site wants people to disable adblocking, they should make valid contents disappear instead of begging for it with a popup.

Vangaurd's login page doesn't work with adblock (completely doesn't show it)

Don't have other examples off top of my head

For the ones you mentioned, Vanguard seems to have a lot of different login pages, but every one I found actually rendered - although some were white for so slow I wondered if they would fail. But not trying Uhaul because obviously I don't want to make a transaction.

It’s by the makers of kagi.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/saf...

1Blocker/AdGuard/etc use two mechanisms:

1) declarative blocking - where you can specify rules to allow/deny requests matching a certain pattern. Those rules need to be declared in advance, you can't do matching at runtime using custom code.

2) they inject a bit of JS into the page to try and tamper with malicious scripts that can't be touched by the declarative blocking. This is error-prone and potentially slow, and is not guaranteed to be bulletproof as the injected code runs with the same privileges as the malicious code. I could see potential race conditions where the malicious code manages to run and exfiltrate sensitive data before the blocking code has a chance of defusing it.

The second approach is a horrible hack that only exists because extensions no longer have full control over the browser's networking, under the excuse of "security".

I mainly browse the web on my PC or laptop at home, which has a browser-integrated adblocker + PiHole.

When I need a browser while on the go, I usually just use it to google things and for some quick lookups the experience is "okay", longer and more in-depth web surfing will be deferred to my home PC using the "tabs from other devices" functionality

Benchmarked on reach plc websites. If I open one in Chrome it actually freezes it up

As I write this, I just realized why I have a pleasant browsing experience: unless I am searching for tech info, I don’t do much browsing except for a few favorite sites.

Whole house ad blocking and my iPhone is pretty much consistently attached to my home VPN to take advantage of the ad blocking.

There’s some small pain points with using public wifi with login screens, enough so that I haven’t had my wife use it yet but I dig it.

iOS also has system-wide DNS ad blocking via DNS-over-HTTPS profiles, without needing any apps or on-device VPN hacks, and that works for all networks/cellular seamlessly.

I can't get everyone on adblockers for all their devices so this is worth it to me. Of course, I also setup basic content blockers where I can as well.

Having a choice in web browsers along with emulators and real file system access were major reasons why I'll never go back to iPad.

It is better than nothing but a world apart from a proper ad blocker and more or less insufficient for modern adtech.

It's easy to use when most OS can have default DNS over DoT/H that can also block non browser apps or even OS itself from connecting to tracking domains.

Chromium based browsers seem to ignore OS default DNS servers unless instructed to use the system default.

Nearly spotless experience, costs me 10 bucks a year. And everyone at home is protected.

there's your problem right there.

Exactly, kind of. It's actually a Chrome that removes the native ads, inserts their own ads they sell as a middle man and a built-in weird crypto currency.

I recall reading that despite the internet being faster, actual website performance has never really improved meaningfully. Whatever speed gains we've achieved have simply been eaten by larger and more complex tracking scripts.

Google themselves are a significant contributor to this problem, for many websites, Google's scripts are the core source of slowness.

I don't think it's unreasonable for users to want to reclaim their browsing experience (and bandwidth). In the sample comparison below we can see savings as high as 90% of data and speed boosts of ~1500% - it's insanity.

https://twitter.com/fr3ino/status/1000166112615714816

>In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal-use led to the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries. He argued that, contrary to common intuition, technological progress could not be relied upon to reduce fuel consumption.

Which is a criticism, it seems, for any system that values resource attribution over efficiency.

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

Of course there was flash to deal with rhen too.

Now back when we had 56K Modems was when it really was unusable!

I don't how sites think i want to read an article and warxh a totally unrelated video at the same time.

I'm really starting to miss old style magazines lately.

Click bait and fake headlines about the next iphone have ruinwd the web.

There should be nothing wrong with just bring good at what you do and not seeking endless expansion (and yes, I know, it's actually dangerous because you're vulnerable to predation in that position).

On the contrary, a lot of (offline) companies are deciding that diversification is bad and they should divest everything outside of one core business. Be it ThyssenKrupp, Alsthom, Bombardier, GE, Phillips, take your pick.

However many web companies choose to diversify. Why not? It helps them retain and gain users, and protects them against heavy hitting competitors (FAANG can copy your business model and features quite quick). E.g. take someone like Snapchat - their features were copied by competitors and they had no differentiator, so they floundered. A Telegram or Signal was little differentiation bar potential diversification, which is why both tried some crypto crap.

It baffles me that Mozilla had/has multiple offices located in some of the most expensive real estate markets in the world. Not just in those markets, but in the very-most expensive parts of said markets.

For example, in Boston they're dead center downtown, for no explicable reason other than the prestige.

It feels like a kid who received 5 games for Christmas and doesn't know what to do.

Good luck replacing the web with request/response markdown. I would figure at the least something that could serve Wikipedia would be a bare minimum.

Can you imagine ATT or Amazon or whatever company website as a slightly fancier markdown file?

The only people that would do it are blogger types.

Still, going back to the main subject. Clearly, it seems google decided that most people do not care enough to actually make decisions to make browsing not painful. I hate this cat and mouse game. It is getting to the point where I really think legal solution is the only one. All techs need to be brought to heel. Hard.

In google's defense, it is not just them. The entire ecosystem is broken. When I try to use my bank's website and I use unprotected chromium, it takes extra minute to load everything up on a page. I am running an equivalent of a supercomputer from 90s and I am stunned at the lazy design. If I try to limit it, it stutters and blocks me at every opportunity. And it is one of the national banks in US. Admittedly, some banks do get it mostly right ( kudos to Discover, Chase and Capital ), but I started going to the branch again and each time they ask me if I used their app/website, I say no and tell them why ( which is usually followed by a survey, which I dutifully fill up... mebbe something will finally filter through ).

This combination of Firefox+uBlock and NextDNS+Private DNS makes Android a pleasurable experience.

If your browser supports adblock (eg on Android use Firefox or Kiwi) then disable DNS filtering for the browser (ie override the system level filtering) by using browser privacy settings to choose an unfiltered DoH provider like Cloudflare.

Why would I want to disable DNS filtering? What advantage does that give?

UBo is great but does use a small amount of CPU whereas DNS filtering won't use any on my phone - its all on the DNS server. I'd rather filter out as much as possible with DNS filtering and then clean it up with UBo cosmetic filtering and more precise blocking.

https://github.com/revanced

Not only that but with SponsorBlock (integrated in Vanced) you can even automatically skip promotional parts of the videos, intros, outros. The experience is excellent.

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

[0] https://backstage.1blocker.com/how-to-block-youtube-ads-in-s...

I've noticed most of the recent android based handled scanner we got at office refuse to even use our dhcp provided dns including to resolve local address (forcing us to use IP instead of dns for our internal warehouse apps) and complain about "no internet" because 8.8.8.8 is not open.

It's open source as well.

I try not to use apps where there's a website equivalent, but I also repackaged a couple of them that I like to rid them of the ads, using apktool.

My mobile experience is blissfully ad-free. It's a delight and I would never go back to the default experience.

Unsure if there's been a development since then.

When that day comes, I'll be very tempted to have a crack at modding it myself, if nothing else springs up to replace it.

The mobile web experience could almost be described as life changing when all of the bullshit is removed.

if not, is there some mechanism in place that can reduce worries around software supply chain attacks on a privileged piece of software like this?

I guess it's mostly attributed to the website handling accessibility wrong, but using the web is more important to me I guess.