A few months ago I set up a Pi-hole at home. I tried to create a decent blacklist by first adding some regexes I found online and then doing some manual optimization by finding ads and blocking the ad requester through the queries page. But in the end it did not work so well. I still get a lot of YouTube ads, for example. So I still rely on uBlock for my ad-blocking.

I just read that Chrome is planning to start weakening ad blocker plugins. I use Firefox, but it is still worrying that the space could potentially keep moving in this direction over time. So I am now more invested in learning how to have more control over my ad-blocking.

Has any of you managed to optimize your Pi-hole to the point that it is possible to browse the internet without an ad-blocker? If so, how did you do it? Are there other good ad-blocking alternatives?

  • tvbusy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    2·
    1 year ago

    Let’s say YouTube has a video and 2 ads:

    1. The video is served from videos.example.tld/video.mp4.
    2. The first ads is served from videos.example.tld/ads/ads1.mp4.
    3. The second ads is served from ads.company.tld/ads2.mp4.

    PiHole will be able to block only (3) because DNS applies at domain level, as in videos.example.tld. DNS requests only send the domain part and re-use the response for all addresses using that domain.

    Browser extension, on the other hand, sees a request to .../ads... and block it since it handled each HTTP/S request and know the full URL.