Best ad blockers - are free ones decent?

Caporegime
Joined
29 Jan 2008
Posts
59,179
Hey guys, can anyone recommend some ad blockers, please?

I've generally not bothered with them before as I don't care about adverts mostly and also think free sites should be supported etc.. but now if I look on news sites (in particular US news sites) adverts are all over the place, in particular some gross ones I've got no interest in being on my screen while I try to read the news.

Like there is some tea tree skin peel thing for blocked pores etc.. and some other things like that occasionally and I've got no interest in stuff like that being on my screen when I merely want to read a news article... so ideally I guess a browser extension I can turn on and off.
 
uBlock Origin is available for all browsers. You can also whitelist the sites you want to support. Just press the extension icon and then the off button, and it will remember to stay off for that site.
 
I'll recommend uBlock as well, been a great ad blocker so far and I've used it for a good few years now.

So far since I've installed it, it's apparently blocked 2.48mil ads :eek:
 
I'm a uBlock Origin user on desktop too, but like Blockada on Android. It sets up a local VPN (obviously not a normal VPN) which can easily be turned on or off from the pull-down menu, so I can get in-game adverts if I want them but block them at other times or on other games/apps and browsers.

It's got the advantage (similar to Pi-hole I assume?) in that websites don't realise that ads are being blocked, so you don't get annoying pop ups about needing to disable ad blocking.
 
I'm desperate for an ad blocker for iPhones. Haven't seen an ad on my PC in YT for donkeys, but on my phone they're every bloody 5 minutes!
 
I'm desperate for an ad blocker for iPhones. Haven't seen an ad on my PC in YT for donkeys, but on my phone they're every bloody 5 minutes!

ADGuard does the job - doesn't block anything through the youtube app but seems to work on the website via Safari.

I use uBlock Origin on PC - make sure you have a look through the included lists - I've ticked a few and had better results because of it.



M.
 
uBlock and Pihole
even seems to circumvent the spotify free restrictions when using the web browser. No adds on my playlist and lets me select individual songs and skip when i want.
 
I'm desperate for an ad blocker for iPhones. Haven't seen an ad on my PC in YT for donkeys, but on my phone they're every bloody 5 minutes!

If your using pihole and on your home wireless i think it would filter out most adds as it dumps the dns requests for ad driven websites so you might want to build one. However you cant do that on 4g/5g or whatever....
 
In firefox I also use noScript alongside Adblock just to catch some other sneaky things, it does mean having to manually allow through certain things on websites when you first visit them but it protects against XSS
 
If your using pihole and on your home wireless i think it would filter out most adds as it dumps the dns requests for ad driven websites so you might want to build one. However you cant do that on 4g/5g or whatever....

You can wire guard VPN into your house through 4g and use pihole to block ads when away from home.
 
Back
Top Bottom