This is a screenshot from an NPR article discussing the rising use of ad blockers. The page is 12 megabytes in size in a stock web browser. The same article with basic ad blocking turned on is 1 megabyte.
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It would be interesting to correlate this page bloat to carbon emissions. The amount of electricity needed to send 200KB versus 3MB is miniscule, but if you multiply it by a billion people viewing a thousand pages a day it could add up fast.
Not to mention this locks out a lot of the web to developing nations with limited bandwidth
Jeff’s solution is pihole not firefox? I thought ad blockers did way more complex and subtle stuff than the DNS approach of blocking entire domains?
I’d go with “firefox with uBlock Origin” + “pi hole or similar”.
Yeah, I use pihole + local in browser on all my devices where I can.
5 years later… changes have only been for the worse…
This is a very good suggestion. And if you do not want to do this, you could always use something like Control-D, just by switching your router’s DNS to it. https://controld.com/free-dns
