• madcaesar@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    I’m not technical enough, but why can’t pihole do as much as ublock? It’s at the router level before anything gets to the browser, it has all the same info the browser will eventually get.

    Shouldn’t it be theoretically possible to do the same?

    • qaz@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      It’s at the router level

      It’s a DNS server and does not have the same capabilities as the router

      It has all the same info the browser will eventually get.

      It does not. Not just because of the previous reason but also because most traffic is encrypted nowadays (https) which means that even the router can’t read/modify the traffic to the device.

      Another issue is that some things blocked by uBlock are hard to detect with static analysis in comparison to reading the rendered HTML.

    • teatowel@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Ublock has direct access to the DOM and so can modify what the browser renders. For example, YouTube ads are hosted on the same domains as their videos and so PiHole cannot block them, but Ublock can.