6 About "Why uBlock Origin works so much better than Pi‑hole does?"
Raymond Hill edited this page 2024-03-25 20:15:05 -04:00

Off the top of my head:

  • Cancels network requests early within the browser
  • Pattern-based filtering on the whole URL. Examples:
    • Plain pattern: &act=ads_
    • Wildcard-based pattern: /analytics.*/event?
    • Regex-based pattern: /^https?:\/\/[a-z]{8,15}\.[a-z]{2,3}\/5\/\d{6,7}(?:\?_=\d+)?$/
  • Context information
    • Example: $script,third-party,domain=imgbox.com
    • Point-and-click to enable/disable blocking behavior on a per-site basis:
      • JavaScript
      • Large media elements
      • Remote fonts
      • Etc.
    • You can see what specific network requests are made by what specific page, you can fully inform yourself of what specific pages/sites are causing your browser to do
  • Ability to redirect to a neutered version of a resource
    • Example: ||google-analytics.com/ga.js$script,redirect=google-analytics.com/ga.js
  • Cosmetic filtering, the manipulation of DOM elements in the browser
    • Example: ##.AdHeader
  • Scriptlet injection filtering, the injection of JS scriptlets to modify the behavior of a page which is effective to defuse anti-content blockers
    • Example: wallstreet-online.de##+js(nostif, userHasAdblocker)
  • HTML filtering (Tor Browser and Firefox only), the removal of DOM elements from a document before parsed by the browser
    • Example: wetteronline.de##^script:has-text(runCount)
  • Ability to deal with unwanted popups
    • Example: &link_type=offer$popup,third-party
  • Ability to remove tracking parameters from websites
    • Example: ||wuzhuiso.com^$removeparam=src
  • You can easily (narrowly/broadly) override any filter from the filter lists through simple point-and-click operations to customize your filtering or to quickly fix sites broken as a result of overzealous filters

The main advantage of Pi-Hole is that it filters network traffic from all devices on your network, but filtering is blunt compared to what you can do through a browser extension.