Not installing ublock on your wife's laptop? Why are you so cruel?

The real difficulty hurdle isn't installing it (or having someone install it), the real hurdle is when it breaks something important and you have to realize that Ad Block belongs on the suspect list and you have to know how to disable it, reset cookies, and try again.

This basically never happens if you're using default config uBlock origin

Happens occasionally. It is uncommon but happens enough to ruin the day of unsuspecting users.

For example, go to https://community.ee.co.uk/t5/My-EE-app-and-website/EE-Site-... and search for "Adblocker" in this page. You will find a story where their mobile service provider blacklisted their IP because they clicked on a button on the website while their adblocker was enabled.

Exactly the same thing happened to me with the same mobile service provider except that I was using uBlock origin when my mobile service provider blacklisted my IP.

Bank websites sometimes breaking in the presence of an adblocker is a common occurrence in many parts of the world.

You live in one geography and you visit websites that you need in your life. Do not assume everyone else is having the same experience as you. Websites breaking in the presence of adblockers is a real thing that sometimes makes us hesitate to install it on the browsers of our friends and family who may not be as tech savvy as we are.

My no contract phone provider is broken by adblock, and will shadow ban my IP temporarily if I forget to entirely disable it and then grant all permissions the site requests.

I still install uBlock Origin on most of my friends computers, but make sure they know to open any sites that break in a private tab.

Yeah, except that has never happened to me in 20+ years of using ad blockers.

Never? So many news websites detect adblocker use and stop you from reading the article till you disable it

I feel like it's not that it never happens to me but that I quickly leave and forget the site that blocks me. Non-survivorship bias.

It depends on how strongly you filter.

The default rules probably won't cause issues, but you'll still see a lot of ads. As you optimize these away, things start breaking

I just use Firefox with unblock for general browsing. Chrome if I'm trying to buy something and I need the page not to break.

i think that is grounds for divorce

I've offered, but she declined. She really likes sales and coupon offers, extensions for cash-back that are based on tracking, etc. Someone else said it best about their spouse on another thread:

"...whenever a website doesn't work for any reason I get an earfull about my 'damn adblocker'..."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30150762

x3

"I like the ads." - Wife

And this is exactly why I don't feel bad about blocking ads and not purchasing YouTube Premium and the like. There are zillions of people out there who actually like looking at all these annoying ads, so the advertisers don't need to bother me when I'm not going to buy their crap anyway, and these other ad-lovers will happily do so.

I hooked up my pihole’s on/off switch to HomeKit. Whenever a website doesn’t work, my wife knows she can open the home app and turn off the Pi-hole and try again.

Do you have any more details on this? Sounds like a great idea for the rest of my household.

Yea, it’s a homebridge plugin: https://github.com/arendruni/homebridge-pihole

Really easy to setup once you have homebridge itself running. Just enter in your Pi-hole api key and add it to HomeKit.

Thank you!

I would highly recommend installing pihole at home.