No adblocker detected

Whenever I open Google's Play Store on Android I get this feeling of walking into some dystopic shopping mall. I hardly ever come there (F-Droid covers all utilities for me, so Google's own app store is really only for official apps from banks, public transport, etc.), so its user hostile design always hits me like a wall of visual noise and clutter.

At these moments that feeling that for most people getting bombarded by ads is normal hits hard. I'm always wondering when the ride will end and uBlock Origin can't protect us any longer.

I'm in the same boat. I never see ads anywhere (and not just on the web: I never watch regular TV (I don't even have a TV), never listen to ads-supported radio stations, etc.)

How people put up with ads is a complete mystery.

The quality control of even mainline ad platforms is abysmal as well. Like on YouTube, I used to get deep-fakes of the Canadian prime minister trying to sell some crypto scam. You'd literally click through to a phishing site disguised as a Canada Revenue Agency page.

I have DNS based adblocking on home router, plus adblock extension.

Every time I use the web using 5G data or public wifi, I regret the experience. Then I immediately turn on an adblocking VPN.

I wonder if you could spend a few million on promoting adblockers to justify a short position on Google or Meta.

Yeah. I use brave on all my devices. When somebody shows me a YouTube video on their device and three ads play before the video, or loads a local news page with all the ads, my reaction is "Wow! They sure are bombarding you guys to make up for us free-riders!"

I really can't comprehend how aggressive ad blocking isn't the norm and at 90%+ at this point. Whenever someone just doesn't seem to care i'm concerned something is wrong with them. Youtube ad blocking was briefly not working for me recently and the volume of ads just while doing some chores which forced interrupting flow to go manually skip was astounding and enraging. It's like if I was at a quiet library and every 30 seconds someone randomly started screaming yet half the people have a reaction of "meh, doesn't bother me".

With uBlock Origin you can actually click on the first Google results for any search, scroll down a bit the initial yadda yadda and find the actual answer to your search even in those webSEOtes that are usually just ads over ads.

> It looks well-intended

The recent PuTTY domain squatting debacle has made me suspicious, and indeed... if you look closer, you'll notice that the owner of ublockorigin.com is also advertising his completely unrelated products in a "my other tools" section.

Your average internet user is not going to have any idea what to do with a link to GitHub. It's a shame there's no official website with easy install instructions. (But I agree with you that it's not a great idea to link to a website not under control of the author.)

Underappreciated comment. But yeah, even on the README, way too much GitHub header. UBO really needs an official landing page.

I have said it years that adblocker is the best anti-virus these days.

> However this culture of expecting websites to host the data then freeloading off it by blocking the tracking and ads is also a bit ugly.

No it isn't. Free websites exist: Wordpress, Blogger, Wix, Weebly etc. The only "ad" they show is a static banner for their own platform, not the giant scripts Google loads for Google Ads. Neocities and Digital Ocean are $5/mo for a custom domain and hosting, theme it anyway you like.

Most "content"-focused websites like Buzzfeed, The Verge, Gizmodo etc simply embed third party content (Youtube, Vimeo, Giphy, random poll generators) instead of hosting them on their domain. Much of their content is rehashing news articles with a paper-thin layer of "analysis" on top. Then they add metric tons of ads, and throw in affilliate link garbage "product reviews" on top.

This is the dropship-ification of the web and it pretty much killed the free website culture of the Geocities/Anglefire era.

My view is that core bargain was fine, but advertisers have broken the agreement with other offenses, like:

* Autoplay videos that preemptively take my bandwidth.

* Autoplay audio that takes over my speakers unexpectedly and interrupts other things.

* Forms of pop-ups that clutter or disrupt my tab/window control.

* Being spied-on by a system that tries to aggregate and track all of my browsing habits.

* A mostly unaccountable vector for malware and phishing sites.

* Just a genuinely horrible experience whenever a page is one part content to three parts blinking blooping ever shifting ads that would make Idiocracy blush.

They try to pretend customer resistance is just over the most innocent and uncontroversial display of ads, but it's not true, and it hasn't been for decades.

Yeah, no thanks. I used to think like this, and i remember exactly what happened the day i installed my first adblocker: i was already annoyed that some sites i visited employed very annoying ads, on both sides of the window, occupying about 20% of the screen, each. And they were serving an animation with _very_ loud music.

That day instead, when i opened the page 3-4 other pages opened as soon as the website loaded, all serving loud and obnoxious virus alerts, porn and some other crap. But how? I disabled popups a long time ago.

That day i found out about self-clicking ads. That day i installed an ad blocker.

It is THEM that have broken the social contract. Screw them and screw ads.

(good thing that i wasn't on dialup anymore. Anybody remember that? scam sites that would make your dialup bill go up crazy, as if you were calling a courier's help line)

Well, hang on. Your comment is fair minded, but to be fair we have to consider the context.

The context is that the courts have found Google holds two illegal monopolies within the online adtech market [1], the remedy for which has yet to be determined. Furthermore the DoJ has sued Meta for holding one as well and that trial is now underway. [2]

I don't know about you, but to me, if the counterparty breaches a contract, that contract is now null and void. Same goes for a social contract, and if someone tries to kill me or rob me, whatever social contract we may have had, is now null and void.

Fortunately Google and Meta aren't actually taking hits out on anyone as far as I know, but the fact remains that the market makers for these online ads, are either outright convicted criminals, or being sued by the government for such. I don't see that we have any social contract to respect or allow any of this. It is right, just and moral to oppose the very existence of online advertising in my opinion, until the illegal abuses are corrected.

If the court has resolved that Google's breaking the law, how about we get an injunction ordering them to halt their ad tech business until the remedies are implemented. Why are we going so easy on them?

You don't owe crooks anything, neither do I.

This isn't about being cheap or breaking a fair deal. It's about asking that law and order be restored within American business and society. What's the point of this society, what moral justification does it have to exist as it is, if it keeps on breaking its own laws to protect the most powerful?

Now it's unfortunate that publishers (websites) get caught in the crossfire of this, they might not agree with me when I say you should oppose all online ads full stop until the problem is corrected, but they are getting screwed by Google and Meta and they would be more than happy to see justice done.

[1] https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/04/18/court-ruling-agains... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTC_v._Meta

This is a fine social contract for the independent blogger just sharing their thoughts on the Internet and maybe hoping to get a few dollars for their server cost.

Mega corporations that have been sucking up personal data for a couple decades now are not people. There is no social contract with them. They just sell your data.

If you know what they are doing, know how to block it, and refuse to, you are complicit in making the world a worse place. Corporations are not people that should be treated with the respect you are talking about.

The websites you speak of don't get to decide what my hardware and my software does when running in my hands. Their content is a suggestion for my user agent, not some unbreakable law. If they don't like it, they should shut down completely.

If I am allowed not to look at the screen when an advert is playing, then I should be allowed not to play it in the first place. There is no moral obligation on the part of the viewer here.

An advert is an investment: someone pays money to broadcast something and hopes that will generate awareness. Any investment is allowed to fail.

The problem is that commercial ad-supported websites force themselves into all available online spaces: search results, discords, social media, affiliate links on blogs. The only way to stop them doing so is to take away their source of revenue.

If ads weren't profitable, you wouldn't find no results for your search about which kitchen knife to buy, you would would find better, less weaponised, more relevant results. If you don't block ads then you are directly contributing to a world with more ads and less content.

FYI you can nuke all that crap with a simple browser bookmark: https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web...

Reread the statement though. Does one person viewing ads pay you more than one dollar?

Guess nowadays they recommend everyone to use Firefox or some other non-crippling browser then also?

I helped my wife with something the other day, noticed the ads everywhere, while I was sure I had installed uBlock for her in the past. Went to the Chrome's addons page, and Google apparently is automatically disabling uBlock and calling it unsupported, yet you can enable it until next time you restart Chrome. But seems Chrome is actively trying to get rid of adblockers lately.

Tried to browse a while with NoScript addon. But barely any page loads, so you need to whitelist almost every page you visit, which defeats the purpose.

I have been thinking about some kind of render proxy that runs all the JS for you somewhere else in a sandbox and sends you the screenshot or rendered HTML instead. Or maybe we could leverage an LLM to turn the Bloated JS garbage into the actual information you are looking for.

Maybe this has changed, but ad scripts used document.write(), which runs immediately (before onLoad or etc). A big reason they are slow.

Old Opera (before it became another Chromium-shell) had an easy JS on/off toggle in the menu, but I don't remember if it only took effect on load or immediately.

Amen to that. I used to think the Stop button in IE did this.

    setTimeout(() => {

        // fuck up all future javascripts

        setTimeout = setInterval = requestAnimationFrame = () => {};
        Element.prototype.appendChild = () => { throw new Error("Blocked"); };
        document.addEventListener = () => {};
        window.addEventListener = () => {};
        Object.defineProperty(document, "readyState", { get: () => { throw new Error("No JS"); } });
        document.write = () => {};

        // fuck up canvas
        if(window.HTMLCanvasElement) HTMLCanvasElement.prototype.getContext=()=>null; 

        // fuck up webgl
        if(window.WebGLRenderingContext) window.WebGLRenderingContext.prototype.getParameter=function(){e=>{throw new Error("Blocked")}};

        // fuck up webgl2
        if(window.WebGL2RenderingContext) window.WebGL2RenderingContext.prototype.getParameter=function(){e=>{throw new Error("Blocked")}};

        // fuck up websockets
        window.WebSocket=function(){e=>{throw new Error("Blocked")}}; window.EventSource=function(){e=>{throw new Error("Blocked")}};

        // fuck up popups
        window.open=()=>null;

        // ...

    }, 500);

or mouseover.