Reminder to switch browsers if you haven’t already!
- Google Chrome is starting to phase out older, more capable ad blocking extensions in favor of the more limited Manifest V3 system.
- The Manifest V3 system has been criticized by groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation for restricting the capabilities of web extensions.
- Google has made concessions to Manifest V3, but limitations on content filtering remain a source of skepticism and concern.
But ads are still often delivered by content delivery which is blockable by domain, hence the reason piholes work. Not that in-stream ads aren’t the future, perhaps, but life finds a way.
What you’re describing is not a man-in-the-middle proxy, but a simple DNS block. That’s a very crude approach to blocking ads and notoriously doesn’t work for YouTube and Google ads because they’re served from the same domain.
I run a pihole myself but there’s still a huge difference between browsing with pihole only and pihole+ublock. It’s certainly not the answer to the Manifest V3 shenanigans.
however its relatively rare that an ad company provides a bunch of services I want to use. The only exception i can think of is google.
obvs its hard to avoid gmaps because the alternatives are beyond godawful (no, openstreetmaps, i didn’t want to go to the coffee shop of the same name in connecticut, I wanted to go to the one 3 km away), but for youtube I use a python tool called youtube-local which is very very effective, strong rec. Im sure google will defeat them eventually, but so far all of the incremental “block a little of this, block a little of that” stuff the g-man has been doing has been bypassed within a few days. Viewtube is also pretty easy to self-host, but they never quite figured out how to make the UI work.