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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

DNS based adblockers have strictly worse adblocking capabilities than manifest v3 adblockers. I mean, sure they have their uses (eg. blocking ads/telemetry in apps or whatever), but bringing them up in this context doesn't really make sense.

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I'd rather have 100% of devices on my network have near 90% of all ads effectively ad blocked than deal with installing ad blockers on all possible clients. Sure, I use an ad blocker on my personal machine with firefox, but none of the phones besides mine does. None of the family that visits do. Barely any of my friends that come over do. None of the TVs and streaming devices and whatnot do. I am blocking more ads from ever reaching my network than the majority of people who only use browser based adblockers do.

I'm surprised to hear that it's so successful beyond banner ads. I figured most platforms would use the same domain for their ads as their content. I'm pretty sure YouTube and my "smart" TV do that. Plus I'd prefer to use DNS over HTTPS instead of using unencrypted DNS.

> Plus I'd prefer to use DNS over HTTPS instead of using unencrypted DNS.

Running unbound or a pi-hole on your network doesn't preclude that.

Your devices talks to the gateway/router/pi-hole on the network, who will then use your chosen DoH providers for upstream requests.

Unbound uses DoH as the upstream provider. So in theory all my DNS traffic leaving my home network is always via DoH

I thought the whole issue with manifest v3 is that prevented extensions from being able to block connections? That DNS blocking is actual blocking, while the extension can only do filtering after the connections are made.

>I thought the whole issue with manifest v3 is that prevented extensions from being able to block connections?

No. See:

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/d...

>The chrome.declarativeNetRequest API is used to block or modify network requests by specifying declarative rules. This lets extensions modify network requests without intercepting them and viewing their content, thus providing more privacy.

They can block, it just has to be declarative unlike before. It's better than DNS adblockers since you can still do content filtering, CSS/JS injections and whatnot.

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