Bocking ads, popups, redirects and all this annoying things is essential.
I prefered HOSTS based blocking on Windows and rooted Androids..
Recently i stopped using rooted Droids for working and switched back to NO-ROOT Stock on Android. The downside is that non-root adblock solutions for Android mostly involve firing up a local VPN, which for me is a no-go to work with on a daily basis.
On Windows a reasonable good blocking HOSTS file gets really huge (55-100MB+) which slowed down my good old Windows 8.1 machine to a non-usable state.
what to do?
DNS based blocking is the solution. Added bonus is that it reduces fingerprintability on your system. There are some DNS Providers running adblocking DNS servers but they provide no or only basic means of configuration.
- https://adguard-dns.io/de/public-dns.html
- https://dnsforge.de/ (!)
- https://alternate-dns.com/index.php
- https://mullvad.net/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls/ (!)
- https://cleanbrowsing.org/filters/
This is a problem since many of them provide "family-protection" blocking, too, resulting in false-positive blocks..
so i discovered https://nextdns.io/
- fully configurable
- choose from many good blocklists
- block native-tracking for Windows, Samsung, Amazon, Apple, Huawei, Xiaomi etc
- custom allow- and denylist
- optionally statistics and logging
- optionally without registration
- IPv4, IPv6, DNS-over-TLS/QUIC, DNS-over-HTTPS
- 300.000 requests free per account.
