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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

I'd really love to have an AR real-life ad blocker. Replace all billboards with works of art.

Separately I think advertising will have to find new forms of expression that are less repulsive. I won't want to block ads if they are actually fun and interesting.

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I am not sure this is a technology problem, this is more of a societal problem. This city had the will to experiment with removing ads, and it had good results

https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...

How many cities have the will to even attempt something like this? Maybe a handful.

I understand the irony of that page having multiple ads :P

The city of Calgary has pretty much no billboards or ads except on public transit property. Its very refreshing.

What makes you think the company that makes the best AR wouldn't put ads in it. The top 3 in the field Microsoft, Facebook, and Google to some extent, would never let you disable ads let alone override them with something you wish.

If people are buying the AR to remove ads, the company that makes AR that just replaces ads with other ads probably won't sell much.

If I own a piece of physical hardware, they can't dictate how it runs software. Hardware ultimately listens to its owner, which is me, not them.

If they try to interfere with that, I will try every route I can to ensure my personal freedom.

For phones you can do most of what you want with LineageOS and Xposed; for AR headsets I'm sure something similar can be done and it's just a matter of time before hackers get together and make freedom a reality.

This is demonstrably not true today because Google wrote the operating system of my phone and I block all ads on it.

To your point, I was about to respond to OP as well, and point out that ad-blockers can be installed on Chrome. Then, I remembered that that's not likely to be the case in the near future[1].

https://www.wired.com/story/google-chrome-ad-blockers-extens...

> and point out that ad-blockers can be installed on Chrome

On desktop, yes (not for much longer). But not on Android.

FireFox on mobile can run plugins including ad-blockers. The lack of plugins on mobile Chrome is starting to become a deal-breaker for me.

IIRC Firefox Mobile is not going to allow extensions anymore within the near future. Although finding the article that brought it up is proving difficult.

Are you thinking about their recent "new Firefox" beta that didn't include extensions? AFAIR this was because they deemed it non-essential for the MVP - but the public response quickly corrected that mistake.

Oh sweet I'm glad they backtracked on that.

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