Picture, thousand words, etc.
Left screen no blocker, right screen PiHole running on a RaspPi 3. A little easier on the eye. I also use Malwarebytes on my workstation as it kills a lot of crap and ads. YouTube on my PC is usable now.
Curious if there is anything better out there.
I’ve been uBlock Origin on firefox. And a PiHole when I’m at home. So far uBlock has been the best ad blocker I’ve found and I’ve tried roughly 20 ad blockers on a few different browsers as well. So far no issues with YouTube on my current setup.
I switched to uBlock Origin Lite when Google announced dropping Chrome support for Manifest v2. Works perfectly fine in YT and I won’t have to change anything when Mv2 goes away.
Also run PiHole, but that’s more for blocking ads on my phone.
uBlock origin is my choice. it works well with most western sites, and have some css / script toggles, which helps a lot with stubborn ones
pfBlockerNG right on the router (pfsense)
Noscript, and Google Analytics opt out / blocker, and ublock , with privacy badger, deventraleyes and still have the no longer maintained umatrix, which I think is going to be depreciated… (umatrix may be a security risk, if it;s not being maintained)
But… it’s not for ad blocking
it;s to try and reduce scripts from third parties.
I have a pihole / personal DNS to also cut down call to places that might be called by the OS itself, regardless of browser.
again, telemetry still gonna be collected, but trying to slim it down while still actually getting usable sites
Ads are essential for the web as we know it, but I much rather generic, Not user targeted - Target the Content, not the visitor, in my view
I just swapped from pihole to adguard home & have been happy with it so far. The reasoning behind this is because pihole doesn’t support redundancy well. I currently have my main adguard home instance running on my unraid server, in docker, along with another container called adguardhome sync that syncs everything from the unraid container to the second instance running on a 4GB raspberry pi 4. I would recommend this setup, along with ublock origin in Firefox of course.
I got uBlock everywhere I could install FF.
I have also ads/malware/tracking blocker on all my VPNs. Somehow all Apple products at home get ads
Not just ad blockers like uBlock Origin and piHole, but moved to LibreWolf.
Default firefox has too much telemetry and crap built in (pocket, untrustworthy “experiments”), annoying UI changes:
ungoogled-chromuim (which will also maintain MV2 for a bit) if you prefer chrome
and Why?
It’s really very simple:
I use Brave which is basically just that. What I love are the multiple OS supported on Brave, so I have the same experience on Windows or Linux.
I’ve wanted to ask Google Chrome users how they would handle the change and if FireFox was ever a consideration? Firefox implementing things to ease the change from Chrome to Firefox should help many. Extensions usable on both, which is probably the crux of it.
Have you tried running those scripts to make the necessary changes to firefox?
I tried switching about a year ago, but the 1 thing blocking the transition is how firefox present large number of opened tabs. Chrome managed to squeeze all 149 tabs in the top bar without any scrolling but firefox can’t.
If I can somehow disable tab scrolling on firefox, I’d switching in an instant.
Had to add this twice ;
I open a ton of images in my tabs, but I do Ctrl + PgUp or Ctrl + PgDn
and move quickly trhough.
I used to be a Firefox main back in the day until Mozilla screwed up the UI and generally made it run like ass. These days it’s fine and I use it to keep my work stuff segregated. However, Chrome is more convenient to sync browser data across my devices.
I use Mullvad Browser these days as my primary browser. Its the Tor Browser without the Tor network
I have liked uBlock origin. It has worked well and I haven’t had any problems with any streaming sites, unlike with some other blockers. I also have 11965 lines long /etc/hosts file that redirects lots of domains to localhost. Well, I do also have uMatrix which blocks all third-party scripts by default but it’s not just for ad blocking.
I’ve also wanted to try PiHole but never got myself around actually doing it.
I use pfBlocker on my router (pfSense). I use wireguard VPN on my laptop & phone which routes all my DNS back to pfSense even if I’m not at home.
I don’t use any browser level blockers, though I’ve heard unlock origin is the gold standard.
YouTube ads have been getting more and more unbearable in the last year or so, which has made me reconsider using a browser level blocker to block those, but I have not done it yet.
I use PiHole on my network as a DNS forwarder for all of my non-server clients in my homelab, all of which gets forwarded to unbound running on my OPNsense router’s, which gets encrypted and sent up to Quad 9 for resolution.
At the browser level, I primarily use Firefox with NoScript, uBlock origin, Canvas Blocker, and Decentraleyes for my day to day browsing. This requires a bit of tuning to get it all working correctly, but it’s my favorite browsing experience by a long shot. If I encounter a site that doesn’t work well with Firefox (a rarity), I use Ungoogled Chromium . If the site also doesn’t like Ungoogled Chromium (an even bigger rarity but has happened), I use Brave.
If anyone is reading this and interested in learning more about how to prioritize their safety and privacy online, do some reading on this site.
I’ve been using uBlock Origin for years, but of late have been considering adding a piHole into my network home and away. A mobile piHole is something I need to look into but I’m willing to go for it as a project.
Another tool I have been looking to use is hblock
If we can’t use our in-browser ad blockers on some browsers then let’s go a step further down the chain. I know that windows users might not have this luxury with how the HOST file works on that OS but on Linux I think it’s something to look into.
