Eight of the Best Tools and Techniques for Blocking Internet Advertisements
I am old enough to have witnessed advertising destroy two major communication media, television and the Internet. I realise this is controversial because some people believe advertising made both possible and are happy with what they see on both. I feel sorry for some people.
TV watchers are not forced to watch advertisements on all networks in all countries. Many countries publicly fund some or most of their TV networks. For their commercial networks, different laws place different restrictions on how many advertisements can be shown per hour. So, depending on where you live and which networks you watch, your TV experience can vary greatly.
Unfortunately, I live in the United States where we seem to watch more TV advertising than programming. In the Summer of 1999, when my disgust for both grew to the point where I could no longer stand it, I threw my TV away. I have never regretted that action.
I have heard several people proclaim that for a number of reasons they are considering abandoning the Internet. A few appear to have already done so, at least for some period of time. But, if you decide to follow their examples, don't blame advertising. I have not talked about ad blockers before on DFDN because so many others have covered them on so many other sites. However, I decided to write this article because despite the fact that so much has already been written, some people still seem not to understand the value of ad blockers and most people appear not to know about the best ways of blocking advertisements.
Unlike television, where we are largely relegated to consumer devices over which we have no control, when it comes to the Internet, we still have these magical devices that some of our children have never heard of. They are called "general-purpose computers", and learning to use one means no longer having to depend on a consumer device that treats you like a lab animal with its eyelids taped open. Do you hear that, children? If you put your mobile phones away and use real computers, you won't have to watch advertisements on the Internet. Yes, I realise many ad blockers also run on mobile phones, but on platforms created and controlled by Apple, Google, and others, they can be taken away at any time using any excuse. By the way, the guaranteed ability to use ad blockers is just one of several advantages of using general-purpose computers. I have talked about the rest before, so I won't repeat them here.
Before I continue, let me explain one thing. You have no obligation to watch advertisements. Not allowing advertisers to waste your time focusing your eyes and ears on whatever trivial trinkets they are peddling is not an immoral act. Your time is your own. You don't owe it to anyone. Taking away their power to force you to do something you don't want to do is a good thing. Sloughing off the chains of advertising frees up more of your life for productive use.
Armed with the knowledge that advertising is a blight on the Internet and you are under no obligation to put up with it, let's now talk about eight of what I consider to be the best tools and methods of removing Internet advertising from your life, all of which are free. I will begin by summarising them below, and then I will discuss them in more detail.
Internet-Advertisement-Blocking Tools and Techniques
Ad Blocker or Add-Free Alternative/Advantages/Disadvantages
• Steven Black's Unified Hosts file
Works on all devices. Easy to install. Blocks third-party advertisements and malware. Doesn't collect your data.
Doesn't block advertisements or popups that are served directly from the website you are visiting. Must be updated manually.
• Privacy Badger
Easy-to-use web browser extension
Doesn't block all ads or work on all browsers or the iPhone
• Brave Browser
Currently blocks all YouTube ads.
Installation may involve more that clicking on a button.
• Windows 10 LTSC
No ads, bloat, Microsoft store, or Copilot. Free support through 2032.
Stripped-down version of Windows that is hard to get, doesn't have all drivers or run all apps, and may be hard to activate. Only blocks Microsoft's on-PC ads.
• uBlock Origin
Blocks ads, trackers, and malware. Works on Chrome, Chromium, MS Edge, Opera, Firefox and all Safari releases prior to 13.
Hard to learn how to use.
• Freevee Skipper Extension
Fast forwards automatically through Amazon Prime ads and works on Chrome.
The slower your Internet connection, the slower the fast forward?
• Ad-blocking DNS servers
When they work, they work well.
Some can be unreliable, leaving you without Internet access at times. You are giving your DNS data to a company.
• Disabling JavaScript in Your Browser
Blocks all tracking, advertisements, and malware, including the popups served by the website you are on.
May break some or all of a webpage's functionality.
This "tool" was pointed out to me recently. It works similarly to a Pi-hole, except that it does not cache your old DNS query results locally for the next time you need them.
Windows, MacOS, and Linux computers all have a file called the "hosts" file. On Windows 10 and 11 computers, it is C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. On MacOS and Linux computers, it is /etc/hosts. Briefly, this file is a hold-over from the old, old days of the early computer networks when every computer on a network performed it's own routing, so it needed to know the network address of every other computer on the network. The hosts file was just a list of network addresses followed by the names of the computers to which they corresponded. These days, each line in the hosts file contains an IP address followed by the name or domain name of the computer at that address. When you click on a link on a webpage in your browser, before your browser queries a Domain Name Server (DNS) out on the Internet for the IP address of the domain name in the link, it first looks for it in the hosts file on your computer. On most of our computers these days, the hosts file contains nothing but two or three IP addresses for the computer on which it resides and perhaps your local router and/or a DNS server or two out on the Internet. But, you can still add any IP address/domain name pair you want to your hosts file.
Steven Black's Unified Hosts file contains about 200,000 of the domain names that are used by advertisers and malware, and all are preceded by "0.0.0.0", which tells your browser that the domain doesn't exist, or the server is off line. This causes your browser to stop looking for the advertiser's server and take no further action. Your browser just stops looking for whatever the advertiser wanted to send you. The end.
As I see it, the greatest advantage of using the hosts file on your computer to block advertisements is that you are not relying on a service. So, no one can use this method to track you or suck up your data. The biggest disadvantage of using your hosts file in this way is that only third-party ads are blocked. The website you are on can still serve you any files it wants, including annoying popup advertisements. A secondary problem is that you will have to remember to periodically download new hosts files to keep yours up to date.
This tool is an open-source browser extension created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation that runs on Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Edge, Brave, Opera, and Firefox for Android. It doesn't run on the iPhone. Privacy badger blocks tracking, and as a nice side benefit it also blocks any advertisement that contains a tracker, which is the large majority of third-party ads. As with Steven Black's unified hosts file, it does not prevent the website you are on from displaying popup advertisements that are served locally by its server. What I like most about Privacy Badger is that unlike uBlock Origin, it could not be easier to use. You just install it and forget it.
As a result of another post, I was recently made aware of the Brave Browser's ability to block YouTube advertisements, which it does perfectly as part of its enabled-by-default tracking and ad-blocking functions. I have not had to watch a single YouTube ad since installing Brave on my HTPC. Obviously, Brave can't block any advertisement that a YouTube influencer presents as part of his video, but Brave blocks all those that YouTube interrupts with, including those that precede the video. I have no idea what other advertisements on other websites Brave may also block, because I have not used it on anything but YouTube.
I know YouTube is putting up a vigorous fight against ad blockers, so I do not know how long Brave will be able to block their ads, but I plan to use it until it stops working. The alternative is sitting through an advertisement literally every five minutes. That frequency is totally unacceptable to me, and it is what drove me to look for an ad blocker in the first place. If not for YouTube's insatiable lust for advertising money, they would probably still be serving me ads. Past a certain point, one just has to say enough is enough and either find a solution to abusive advertising or abandon the offending service.
The biggest problem I see with Brave is that it is difficult to install on a Linux computer. I had to spend thirty minutes identifying dependencies, locating the necessary repository, and installing them before Brave would run on my computer. I assume the installation process is smoother on Windows.
This is not a tool for blocking advertisements on the Internet. It is a version of Windows that does not show the usual advertisements that Microsoft displays on Windows 10 and 11 computers without owners' permission. It also leaves out the bloatware, Microsoft store, and Copilot. Windows 10 LTSC is designed for embedded computers, so it does not contain all of the drivers and applications of the regular Windows versions. I almost never talk about a tool I have not tried myself, but I am making an exception in this case because I have heard good things about Windows 10 LTSC from trustworthy sources. If you decide to install it, you should strongly consider trying it on a spare computer to see how you like it before just slapping on your main (or only) Windows machine and hoping for the best. Another thing about this version of Windows is that Microsoft doesn't want consumers using it, so they intentionally make it painful to activate. That is another reason to test it first on some unused computer.
This is an extension that works on Chrome, Chromium, MS Edge, Opera, Firefox and all Safari releases prior to 13. Google recently disabled uBlock Origin in Chrome, but supposedly you can re-enable it if you choose. Although this tool will block essentially everything you don't want to see on a website, making it probably the most powerful ad-blocking software of its kind, I don't particularly like it because it requires too much tweaking. I have included it in this list mostly for completeness and for those who are willing to spend time fiddling with it to get exactly the Internet surfing experience they want.
Freevee Skipper Extension
This is an extension for the Chrome browser. I have done nothing more with it than install it and verify that it works with my Amazon Prime account. It does work, by the way, and it is a tool that is sorely needed by anyone who is paying for Amazon Prime and objects to being forced to watch advertisements as well. For anyone who believed the poppycock that paying for a service meant not having to watch advertisements, Netflix and Amazon Prime are exhibit "A" and "B" which prove that theory to be false. No amount of money is ever enough for publicly-traded companies. They simply will not stop raising their fees, adding advertisements, lowering the quality of their service, or putting new restrictions on the service until they have driven enough customers away that they go out of business. The same thing is currently happening with Plex. Corey Doctorow appropriately labelled this process "enshittification". This is simply the nature of publicly traded companies. So expect it, and feel no shame in blocking their advertisements whenever you can. They certainly feel no shame in making you watch their ads whenever they can.
I don't know anything more about the Freevee Skipper extension. I have no idea whether it blocks advertisements on services other the Amazon Prime because I haven't tried. I also don't know what data Freevee Skipper sucks up or what it does with it. You may want to find out before you install it.
I have tried a few of these and found them to work quite well. Unfortunately, their success seems to mean that many other Internet users have also begun using them, so they are sometimes burdened with more traffic than they can easily handle. As a result, they can be a bit slower than other DNS's. The big problem I have had with them is that they sometimes go down, and when they do, you need to be capable of trouble shooting your Internet connection. Since you can no longer access websites, you can't just "google that". I trust you see the problem here?
The other problem is that you are trusting a free DNS provider with your web-surfing history. As we all should know by now, trusting any service with your data is probably not a good idea. But for those who just don't care, I have included this category because it works well - until it doesn't! My strong personal preference is for the local hosts file solution that I mentioned previously.
The easiest way of employing an ad-blocking DNS service is by substituting the IP addresses of their servers for the DNS server IP addresses already in the settings of your router. Then, make sure every computer on your home network uses the DNS servers designated by your router. If your computer's IP address on your home network is assigned by the DHCP server on your router, then the DHCP server on your router should also have assigned the DNS IP addresses to your computer that you selected in your router's settings. You can change the DNS servers that your Linux computer is using temporarily (until it reboots) by changing the "nameserver" values in the /etc/resolv.conf file to the IP addresses of the DNS servers that you would like to use.
Turning Off JavaScript
If all of the above methods are insufficient for your needs, your last resort is to disable JavaScript in your browser. Without JavaScript, popups and any advertisements not directly embedded in the text of the webpage are blocked, meaning all of the annoying advertisements are blocked. This is the nuclear option for ad-blocking because many websites require JavaScript for basic functionality, so they may not work as well or at all with JavaScript turned off. The added benefits of this method are that it also blocks tracking and malware and disables most paywalls.
Final Words
Hopefully, I have mentioned at least one tool or method in this article of which you were not previously aware. When correctly employed, they transform the Internet experience completely. While those around you are suffering with all manner of infuriating advertisements that make a casual perusal of the Internet impossible, you are seeing only what you want to see. And you see it much faster because your computer is no longer downloading tens of megabytes of tracking and advertising JavaScript per bloated webpage. So do yourself a favour, and learn how to use these tools. Then, tell your friends and relatives about them.
Of course, if you are on the Gopher or Gemini networks, the above techniques are not needed! But of course, some things are only available on the web, and some things can be done only on the web. Just remember that the venerable Gopher and the modern Gemini are a quiet place you can escape the hell of internet enshittification - see below for an explanation the term.