I eventually moved to Conkeror (think Firefox, but with Emacs bindings and Emacs-like extension via javascript; I know cue the egg throwing). I was looking at other browsers to replace Firefox, as I got sick of it, and I picked Conkeror.
Conkeror has a neat little feature called content-policy. I can block kinds of crap per session or site (Flash, JS, Fonts, Object tags, Images, you name it). I use this and by default all our blocked completely. I can reload a buffer when I need it (even on HN I leave all this crap off). I used NoScript before and I like this as more basic and defensive tool built into the browser core. Check it out.
For when I do use Javascript (this is on Linux of course), I uses hostsblock[0] to redirect all blacklisted sites in /etc/hosts to a local DNS proxy on 127.0.01 on my laptop (dnsmasq, which we all probably know, and you could set it up upstream on a router or server for a group of people). Then I use kwakd as recommended to serve white space for all these redirected domains.
The end result, now I open up JS when I need, and like 100,000 domains are blocked. I check when certain shady domains are mentioned to look for stones unturned, and I rarely see exceptions that are not listed (by default even no cookie YouTube domains are blocked, so JS-less pages give you a blank YouTube box on sites a lot).
So why all this effort? Because this is the second or third time I read "ad-blocking company not as dedicated as you think to your principles" articles. And people who argue "my website needs your ad revenue" you ask? Honestly, fuck 'em. I can't be bothered. Be adults, as you do not believe in legislation on Minority Report-like ads following me around in realtime while I walk in public or forcing my eyes open to read newspaper and billboards just for ads, I think I have the right to voluntarily ignore them as I will not buy your shit or shill for you anyway and it is waste of both of our time. I do not mandate everyone look away, but give me the privilege too thank you very much. And I know a company cannot be trusted long term to defend this right as it is not in their interest, especially if it is their core model ad companies (all mentioned here Adblock, Ghostery, disconnect.me will change their tune if they have not already say).
In short, do not use corporate-backed tools for this. Said companies always change their mind.
More on this: "At the heart of Konqueror is the KHTML rendering engine (which was chosen by Apple to create WebKit, which today forms the basis for modern browsers like Safari and Chrome)."
I currently use the list provided here [0] which is pretty comprehensive, and just append it to my /etc/hosts file manually; updating it evry now and then is good enough.
My question is, why do you need dnsmasq (other than for speeding up dns queries), and why do yo need to serve a blank page instead of simply redirecting network requests to /dev/null?
And I use uzbl [1] for browsing, which is a neat little webkit based browser, with Vim like controls, and stripped to the bare minimum, thus the need for an alternative to adBlock.
Well, the dnsmasq I can use for other things. I think I read on the Arch Linux BBS it would improve performance and speed, but I am claiming empiricism on someone else's behalf which is the descent into a badly administered computer.
The blank page serving is one parth aesthetic, one part performant. It looks better, and also certain Javascript items (for instance very persistent stuff like Google CDNs and the other players) time out even with this sometimes. Without, many pages would take ages to load with timeouts in HTML, CSS, JS, you name it.
So, it sounds like we are in a similar boat, so I thought I would let you check out my rig. I tried to get into uzbl, but Conkeror and LuaKit were more my style. I kept adding and removing LuaKit, because there is something I feel at home with in Conkeror (I think it is the Xulrunner/Firefox core, so I have been deploying custom kiosks in computer labs with auto-login and heavily modded Firefox instances with crazy user-pref for ages now).
You do realize given what I wrote I would never use that, right? And for others, if we cannot trust their ad-blocking, why we would trust them with our DNS? If I wanted badly implemented filtering I would stick with: my own ISP, OpenDNS, this, in that particular order.
I eventually moved to Conkeror (think Firefox, but with Emacs bindings and Emacs-like extension via javascript; I know cue the egg throwing). I was looking at other browsers to replace Firefox, as I got sick of it, and I picked Conkeror.
Conkeror has a neat little feature called content-policy. I can block kinds of crap per session or site (Flash, JS, Fonts, Object tags, Images, you name it). I use this and by default all our blocked completely. I can reload a buffer when I need it (even on HN I leave all this crap off). I used NoScript before and I like this as more basic and defensive tool built into the browser core. Check it out.
For when I do use Javascript (this is on Linux of course), I uses hostsblock[0] to redirect all blacklisted sites in /etc/hosts to a local DNS proxy on 127.0.01 on my laptop (dnsmasq, which we all probably know, and you could set it up upstream on a router or server for a group of people). Then I use kwakd as recommended to serve white space for all these redirected domains.
The end result, now I open up JS when I need, and like 100,000 domains are blocked. I check when certain shady domains are mentioned to look for stones unturned, and I rarely see exceptions that are not listed (by default even no cookie YouTube domains are blocked, so JS-less pages give you a blank YouTube box on sites a lot).
So why all this effort? Because this is the second or third time I read "ad-blocking company not as dedicated as you think to your principles" articles. And people who argue "my website needs your ad revenue" you ask? Honestly, fuck 'em. I can't be bothered. Be adults, as you do not believe in legislation on Minority Report-like ads following me around in realtime while I walk in public or forcing my eyes open to read newspaper and billboards just for ads, I think I have the right to voluntarily ignore them as I will not buy your shit or shill for you anyway and it is waste of both of our time. I do not mandate everyone look away, but give me the privilege too thank you very much. And I know a company cannot be trusted long term to defend this right as it is not in their interest, especially if it is their core model ad companies (all mentioned here Adblock, Ghostery, disconnect.me will change their tune if they have not already say).
In short, do not use corporate-backed tools for this. Said companies always change their mind.
[0] More info here: http://jasonwryan.com/blog/2013/12/28/hostsblock/
UPDATE: Fixed cue typo. Thanks for pointing it out, Thomas, whoever you are.