Hush: Noiseless Browsing for Safari (also ad blocking questions)

Gruber wrote about this the other day. At first, I thought it was a sponsor but he’s pretty clear when it is. And who doesn’t hate the cookie warning.

I’ve been slowly moving back to Safari, since acquiring an M1 MBP. I’ve been using FF, since I had to be more cross platform, but with the new M1 not so much. Since I’ve been using more Safari, I’ve noticed many more ads as I was using uBlock Orgin of FF (of course, duh!), so I’ve been thinking about taking the ad blocking to a higher level.

My Asus router has Adguard DNS built in. I haven’t flipped the switch yet, as I know it’s a free service and I question what they’re getting from me for it. I know pi-hole is popular. I don’t have a spare pi, but I could probably get it running in a VM or maybe Docker (though I’ve never gotten anything in Docker to work) on my always running PC.

I guess my question is, what kind of issues are there with running higher level ad blockers? Can it break some sites’ functionality? I know that happens on occasion when using strict tracking blocker profiles on FF/Edge, but you can easily turn that off at the moment. And I would hate to break something my wife uses without her having an easy way to turn it off.

I’m using 1Blocker with Safari. I run into many sites that don’t work on Safari whether or not content blocking is active (1Blocker). So, I jump over to another browser when that happens. It’s usually Safari that breaks sites.

I configured my wife’s MacBook so that it bypasses our pi-hole.