uBlock Origin works best on Firefox
Wow, what an awesome dive into some of the technical aspects behind one of my favorite tools for using the web. And I do think of it that way these days, it&#x27;s fairly stunning on some sites to switch off all the block and see how they become genuinely unbrowsable. I remember seeing Gorhill discuss a few times over the years some of the reqs for uBO during certain times (like why it could no longer work with Safari following changes Apple made a while back), but so cool to have it all collected in one place.<p>Having said that I&#x27;ve also been fairly stunned recently to see how much difference a simple DNS blacklist system can make too. Not because it&#x27;s a big technical achievement but because it <i>isn&#x27;t</i> and in principle seems relatively trivial to work around. But as I&#x27;ve been switching all my routing from UniFi to OPNsense, I&#x27;ve gone ahead and tried out Unbound&#x27;s basic built-in blacklisting. While it&#x27;s no uBO, it works on every single device and browser including in apps and it seems like it really shouldn&#x27;t, that more parties would just be proxying ads through their own infra and DNS. Been kind of an interesting illustration of technical vs economic influences in an ecosystem. I can see how proxying would add complexity and cost to setup so it must just be that few enough people do it the ad industry can&#x27;t be bothered.<p>But should that ever catch on (and it could, Raspberry Pi seems fairly well known) I expect uBO to be able to keep up with the cat-and-mouse long after DNS has been left behind. This piece helps underline how incredibly important maintaining a critical level of diversity in the browser ecosystem is. Just shortly ago there were a bunch of complaints again about Apple not allowing Chrome to be on iOS because it &quot;holds back the web&quot;, but what &quot;holding back the web&quot; looks like is certainly a matter of perspective...