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I Finally Installed an Ad Blocker
- snarkerson 5y agoHow anyone used the internet without and adblocker AND script blocker is beyond me. This is my hardware and I am going to control it.
- Beaver117 5y agoCurious how do you browse the internet without scripts? I've heard people doing this for over a decade and even then it would render most of the internet unusable.
- caleb-allen 5y agoI've tried it a few times for couple of weeks at a time, and it is really difficult. I inevitably enable scripts after a few weeks. It's just so tedious to do by hand, although it's nice to browse without jarring changes to the page as you load. It would be great if there were some kind of community powered block list that adhered to some kind of standard. Probably easier said than done
- heavenlyblue 5y agoI just have a plug-in that allows to disable us for a specific website
- vimacs2 5y agouBlock Origin makes this pretty easy actually. You just have to enable the "I am an advanced user" checkbox in it's settings and it turns into a more user friendly NoScript, with an easy way to save settings for specific sites that require third party scripts or frames to function. As the creator himself says, uBlock Origin is not just an ad blocker, it's a wide spectrum blocker.
- Shared404 5y agoFor me, I just enable things piecemeal as I think a site is worth it. I know there are people who maintain a browser profile with scripts enabled - for the Twitter's and Indeed's of the world that get upset if you don't have scripts on.
- bostbayawayy 5y agoYou allow scripts on sites that require them, as needed. Maybe you allow a few big domains like cloudfront. Let's use CNN as an example. I load their mobile site with scripts blocked, and I see a menu with links that lead to mostly-broken news sections. So I allow scripts from cnn.com, and the frontpage loads normally. The links work, and I can even see the puppy bowl headline's gif. When I check which sites were blocked from loading JavaScript, there are 20 domains: ads-twitter.com, adsafeprotected.com, bounceexchange.com, casalemedia.com, cnn.io (probably okay?), cookielaw.org, etc... Most modern sites have dependencies that don't really seem necessary. Social media, ad networks, telemetry...whatever those sites want to do, I don't really need it to read a news story.
- mrkramer 5y agoYou made one of the best decisions of your life.
- b0tch7 5y agoAsk HN: what does everyone use for ad blocking on mobile? Fwiw I'm on Android and use Chrome but curious for what people do
- wutbrodo 5y agoI just switched from Chrome to Brave. The HN hivemind tends to jump all over Brave with criticisms of their "attention token" monetization scheme, but this criticism has never made any sense to me. I just....don't use BAT, and never think about it at all.
- NicoJuicy 5y agoBlokada on Android. I used Nextdns in the past.
- LordHeini 5y agoFirefox with uBlock Origin.
- 6equj5 5y agoFirefox, µBlock Origin, and NoScript: the holy trinity. ;p
- vimacs2 5y agoJust an FYI, NoScript is made largely redundant with uBlock Origin since if you enable the "I am an advanced user" checkbox in it's settings, it will allow you to selectively block or allow third party scripts and frames.
- aclelland 5y agoI use DNS66 and have done for a few years. Works really well with Chrome on Android. If you frequently use a VPN it means you need to remember to switch it back on.
- CharlesW 5y ago1Blocker (iOS) and NextDNS.
- 5y ago
- armchairhacker 5y agoSame. I actually used to have AdBlock Plus even though it’s inferior to uBlock origin. I honestly don’t care if all ads are blocked, and i still don’t care. But the issue was I started getting sites spammed with ads covering content even on AdBlock, as well as many sites adding an overlay which required me to explicitly disable ABP for the site (and ABP would keep forgetting my settings so i had to keep disabling it for the same sites).
- NGRhodes 5y agoI only care about blocking adverts that ruin the browser experience. Is there any adblocker that allows a user to select rules to allow/deny based on parameters such as load time, CPU usage and bandwidth ?
- paulryanrogers 5y agoWhy not just stop visiting sites with onerous ads?
- NGRhodes 5y agoI tend not to return, but how do I know in advance that a site will have onerous ads ? Also generally well behaved sites sometimes serve up terrible adverts.
- zabzonk 5y ago> I value rely on revenue from unobtrusive ads. I even have small ads on my own site Perhaps some hypocrisy here?
- loudtieblahblah 5y agoI prefer adnaseum We should punish the world being built upon ads. We need to be aggressors and go on the offense rather than passively blocking them The drive for increasingly fine tuned ads is what destroyed our privacy at the corporate level. Then this data became ripe for the taking by government. Ad networks are used to spread malware, suck of bandwidth the advertiser externalizes to you. If you want people to pay for content - make content worth paying for. And if we can't have social media bc the cost would be too much to bare without ad revenue? I consider this a problem solving itself. Adios.
- missedthecue 5y agoAdnauseum clicks are easily filtered out by ad networks
- axiosgunnar 5y agoBut it forces them to spend resources on it, lowering their margin, which in turn prevents them from saving up a war chest of cash that allows them to stop innovating and just buy up newcomers (eg Facebook buying Whatsapp, Instagram, etc)
- missedthecue 5y agoI doubt google is spending $billions on a script that filters bots.
- belter 5y ago"It might be unusual for a web developer, but up until recently I’d never had an ad blocker installed..." This must be the understatement of the century...
- simonblack 5y agoI once had the misfortune while travelling abroad for almost a year to have a monthly data quota of a mere 2 gigabytes. Calculate that out. It's only a miserable 60 megabytes a day. When some web pages can be 2 or 3 megabytes EACH! due to all the crap (advertisements, mainly), it's easy to see that your whole internet bandwidth capabilities are horribly restricted. And more to the point, you're paying for those companies to restrict your overall usage. I have always used an adblocker. I have most times also used a site-blocker. I have no apologies for doing so. My machine, my money, my choices.
- toastal 5y agoThis is where hosts blocking comes in handy with portable devices. It's a shame this requires root access, mostly because banks and other apps like it's a sin to have admin access on your personal device.
- sumtechguy 5y agoThis what mostly got me into adblocking in the first place when Time-Warner started talking about data caps. I started with using a pac file, host file, and then mixed in a local proxy server. Aggressive DNS caching. I was hitting upwords of 60-70% cache hit ratio on the squid proxy server. In addition to the local cache from the browsers. My testing was a set of pages with cold cache took about 2-3 mins to load. After turning everything on it was in the 50-70 second range cold and 20-30 seconds warmed up. I was sold. Faster loading times, less ads, and possible future benefit of data caps coming into play. These days it is mostly just ublock origin, and noscript. That is because everyone went aggressively towards https, less than 10% hit rate these days on squid. I could MITM the thing. But have not done it yet.
- nicbou 5y agoI still travel on 3GB/month. I didn't realize it was such a constraint. Hell when I leave the EU I rarely use data at all. In any case, Google Maps uses half of that data. Spotify uses a lot too. If I use OsmAnd for maps, I'm fine. Most of my internet usage is casual browsing. When I'm offline I just read books and offline articles.
- nicbou 5y agoAs wev developers, we should still use the web without ad blockers sometimes (and on shitty phones and shitty monitors). That's how our users browse the web. When you see how terrible other websites are, you might be tempted to do something different, as a competitive advantage.