Any recommendations for a good ad blocker and other precautions to take?
I know most people trash on Brave, but honestly, if you disable its crypto features (which is just a click away), it's actually a decent browser that blocks almost all ads I see, even on iOS!
For example, YouTube has no ads in iOS Brave. Since iOS doesn't allow real browsers and extensions, Brave has been a sanity-saver for me.
Pair that with uBlock on desktop and you're golden. 98% of the sites don't break at all either.
Any recommendations for a good ad blocker and other precautions to take?
I use adnauseam ( https://adnauseam.io/ ), which is built on top of ublock origin, and it works pretty well. The generic nuclear option to hide terrible web design, bypass (some) paywalls, and improve performance 1000x is to disable javascript. ublock and adnauseam both have a button to disable all javascript on a page, which is handy when reading articles on sites filled with garbage.
>both have a button to disable all javascript on a page
Be slightly careful, there's a known issue (limitation of Chrome really) where requests and javascript are not blocked in the first few seconds of launching a browser or an incognito window (you can test this yourself). And this is true even with "Suspend network activity until all filter lists are loaded" enabled, because I think it's some limitation on Chrome as to when exactly extensions get loaded.
So if you do rely on javascript being disabled for safety, after a fresh launch or new incognito window, you should visit a safe webpage first before going to the risky one.
Any recommendations for a good ad blocker and other precautions to take?
I know most people trash on Brave, but honestly, if you disable its crypto features (which is just a click away), it's actually a decent browser that blocks almost all ads I see, even on iOS! For example, YouTube has no ads in iOS Brave. Since iOS doesn't allow real browsers and extensions, Brave has been a sanity-saver for me. Pair that with uBlock on desktop and you're golden. 98% of the sites don't break at all ei…
Safari on iOS does allow extensions. It also is a “real” browser, whatever that means. iOS does not, however, allow _alternate rendering engines_, which is different.
Any recommendations for a good ad blocker and other precautions to take?
Pi-hole ( https://pi-hole.net/ ) is a great ad blocker that requires no changes to your clients.
I feel like, for those asking for cursory information about setting up an ad blocker, ublock origin should be recommended, and not pi-hole. Ublock Origin is a one click solution that works great for everyone, while pi-hole requires setup and does quite a lot. For instance, when I was using pi-hole, Windows Update and Epic Games Launcher simply stopped working for me. I'm not sure what was going on, it could have been something wrong on my end, but nonetheless, I'd hate having to help a user with issues like this after recommending pi-hole when all they wanted in the first place was a simple ad blocker. In my opinion, pi-hole is great, but it should only be brought up in cases where the user has already communicated they want something more than UBO.
Pretty late to the game there, FBI. There are examples going back decades of drive by downloads and exploits from ads on popular websites. It's not enough to avoid shady websites. Any website filled with ads is already a shady website.
I know most people trash on Brave, but honestly, if you disable its crypto features (which is just a click away), it's actually a decent browser that blocks almost all ads I see, even on iOS! For example, YouTube has no ads in iOS Brave. Since iOS doesn't allow real browsers and extensions, Brave has been a sanity-saver for me. Pair that with uBlock on desktop and you're golden. 98% of the sites don't break at all ei…
Safari on iOS does allow extensions. It also is a “real” browser, whatever that means. iOS does not, however, allow _alternate rendering engines_, which is different.
It allows one real browser. The rest might as well just be reskins for how little it matters.