Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

StardustOne

macrumors member
Jun 27, 2010
34
18
I tried ad blockers in the past, most pages that are aware of the blocker annoy you then with messages and popups that they want you to remove the blocker.

My recent project solved all this, and it is affordable too. I grabbed an old Raspberry Pi 2 and have set up Pi Hole. It was super easy and the filtering with just the default list is from what I can tell after 3 weeks of use, very very good. Ads do not show up and do not annoy me anymore.

I noticed that I cannot click on sponsored links in Google results anymore, but that is not a huge issue and it is working as designed. Pi Hole also provides you with lots of information what was blocked by what device, I think it is a great solution for getting your browser back.

Furthermore, since I have used Q9 as one of the suggested DNS services when setting up Pi Hole, I also get great protection from this non profit orgainsation that is located in Switzerland and I am protected by Swiss Data Protection law. Win-win for me:).


Since Google is soon stopping support for Ublock Origin plugins, I decided, it is time to move on.
 

vjl323

macrumors 6502
Sep 7, 2005
348
315
Western North Carolina
I tried ad blockers in the past, most pages that are aware of the blocker annoy you then with messages and popups that they want you to remove the blocker.

My recent project solved all this, and it is affordable too. I grabbed an old Raspberry Pi 2 and have set up Pi Hole. It was super easy and the filtering with just the default list is from what I can tell after 3 weeks of use, very very good. Ads do not show up and do not annoy me anymore.
Mentioned in prior replies, but yeah, Pi-Hole and AdGuard Home are both free, open source, and great solutions. AdGuard runs on more platforms [including old Macs] and combined with AdGuard Extras and the free version of the Safari extension, I never see any "please stop using your ad blocker" messages even when I turn AdGuard Home off.

Pi-Hole is nice, but does require more knowledge for the settings, as they aren't as easy to set as AdGuard Home [I've tried both and AdGuard Home wins with ease of use, features, and platform support, but that's just my opinion].
 

SG-

macrumors regular
Jun 8, 2015
151
89
I've used ublock origin in the past in other browsers like Chrome and recently Orion browser since I really wanted a "real" ad blocker. however I gave up on them after seeing my MacBook Air's battery only last 5-6 hours vs the 10-12 hours using Safari.

So I setup piehole on a machine on my network and I installed AdGuard for Safari and it's been running so smooth and fast. I find this combo is the ultimate, piehole will block most things before it even reaches my MacBook saving some processing time and whatever is left AdGuard takes care of it.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.