This is quite old, the situation has become even more extreme since. You should use uBlock Origin, the other one isn't being maintained any more. There is a pre-release Safari version as well now: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#safari-macos
Whats great is Adaway on rooted Android. This app auto updates the hosts file. https://adaway.org/
I wish they had something like this for windows. I would chip in to get it developed.
However, youtube has recently changed something and I am now seeing ads in front of videos - and I have not found a fix yet.
Not only is the topic out of date, so is the method of fighting ads and tracking.
I find DNS based network-wide "blockers" far more effective and resource friendly. They protect on all of the devices in your local network and they even stop the in-app adds on your mobile devices.
https://pi-hole.net/
(yes, you can run it on a VPS and share the love but about a million or two Chinese might decide to take a piece of that love pretty soon. Run it on-site.)
I disagree. While DNS-based blocking can block more advertisements on mobile devices, such as in-app advertisements or in browsers without extension/content blocker support, it's nowhere near as flexible and a major pain to work around in case of false positives. Furthermore, it only works on your local network (it will be abused for DNS amplification DDoS attacks if you open it to the world), and requires dedicated hardware. It's nowhere near as easy to set up or as flexible as a browser addon.
uBlock Origin is indeed incredibly easy to enable, that's why It's my backup when I'm away from home (and I use it on Firefox/Aurora for Android when mobile).
However you might be overstating the difficulty of deploying a DNS server a tiny bit, especially Pi-Hole.
You don't need dedicated hardware per-se, but a small investment in the form of a Raspberry PI (even Zero is fine) makes the deployment almost trivial in most environments.
I'd also recommend looking into Orange PI, not only is it cheaper but I believe it's also POE powered, making it even more elegant on supported routers and switches.
Install, use it's IP as the DHCP DNS entry, done.
It comes with real time stats so false positives are relatively easy to identify, I've never had to do it.
Using browser supported methods should be more efficient. Content security policy (what's used in ublock) means requests don't even get made, and the browser 'knows' this, whereas if your DNS just keeps getting blocked you may still be attempting the query.
But having a DNS fallback for other applications is nice too.
By far the biggest perk of this method is expanding the privacy and protection blanket on to platforms that make it incredibly difficult to otherwise block ads and tracking.(cough stock Android).
It's also nice to see 50k blocked attempts at the end of a slow day.
The problem for me is that there's sites I'm happy allowing their ads through because they provide useful content, and their ads are not annoying and all over the place. Blocking at the DNS level means I no longer have the same flexibility to pick which sites I can allow advertising from.
