ads were a terrible monetization strategy from the start. I’ve never felt bad about adblocking, if you require payment for upkeep offer me a subscription service.
This, you don’t have to even run a program. Every phone uses the host file all day all the time anyway, you’re just telling it to load nothing instead of usual behavior of “no it’s not hosted here, go get it online” you’re just saying “no, don’t go get it, it’s hosted here” except it’s not, so it isn’t retrieved at all.
It would give you access to the host file Before anything connects to the internet, it checks the host file to see if the address is already located there. (Why download it again if it’s already stored locally?) So one can use the host file to list all the ad networks you done like and POOF all those ads are gone (unless you’re actually hosting them from your phone, but you’re not so it will return null)
The problem is, the host file is a system file you can’t access without root access. Try it on your home pc 🖥 winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm
I was trying to learn c++ there was this really great and free site. I decided to turn ads on for them since everything was high quality and free.
There were a few ads that played, but they changed every few minutes. The ads were not the same width, so they they changed they pushed the text around.
So in the middle of reading all the text would jump around and make you lose your place.
For me the tipping point was when ads started becoming malicious. As long as ads are not static and are being served by unaudited and unregulated third parties, they have no home on my browser. I feel bad about it because I understand that some independent sites legitimately need the revenue but unless they provide information about how they vet their ad providers or they only serve static ads, I’m going to block them.
The intrusiveness of ads is bad, but the fact that code I don't want and didn't explicitly authorize is running on my machine is a massive security hole. Not too long ago hackers infiltrated the ad networks of major newspapers and replaced the ads with propaganda.
We have no idea how many times exploit code has been put on these ad servers. And we're just supposed to trust a bunch of sysadmins to make sure the javascript that lets them track us hasn't been replaced with something nefarious?
Browsing the internet on mobile devices has gotten so bad in the last few years. It's all but guaranteed that at least quarter of the space on any website is going to be taken up by floating ads that don't move as you scroll. Some of them it's over half. I cannot understand how normal folks navigate the web without adblockers.
Yo, after I switched to Firefox, I realized its mobile app offers ad blocking add-ons for mobile. Holy shit was that a dealmaker for me. I actually want to browse the web on my phone again.
uBlock Origin is very powerful thing. It can remove link tracking (I posted links before if you’re interested); it can remove parts of site; it can change JavaScript and its response. Basically, everything is possible.
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