Just replaced the hard drive in my 7 year old iMac. The ad blocker that was there is gone. I'm looking for suggestions for a replacement. Thanks
Another solution is an ad blocker for your whole home network. Advantage is no ads on your smartphones when on the home wifi, also works if you VPN to the home network when using WiFi hotspots. I use something called Pi-Hole running on a Raspberry Pi - a tiny computer, size of a deck of cards, cost is pretty minimal. Small amount of setup needed but very easy.
The Pi-hole/Raspberry pi setup sound interesting. Does it connect to your router then the other devices connect to it? My network has two desktops hardwired to the router then two to four laptops via wifi and two to six phones via wifi. Do you see any performance degradation on your network?
The PiHole is plugged into the router and the address of the PiHole is put into the router as the first DNS server which routes all network traffic through the PiHole. I'm using a Pi 2 which doesn't do gigabit ethernet - actually none of the Pi models do true gigabit - something to do with the chipset I guess - and I honestly don't notice any degradation but I'm not a gamer. My son-in-law, who is a hard-core gamer, might claim some impact but I doubt he could actually measure it. There are, of course, occasional sites that you will try to access and find that they are blocked by the Pi-Hole but you can add them to a whitelist or suspend the Pi-Hole temporarily from the web interface admin page.
Learn to edit your hosts file. I have long lists of a lot of ad servers I just block from the get-go.
That's fine - as far as it goes - but nowhere near as convenient as ad-blockers where you can whitelist a site or temporarily disable the protection with a click or two. I believe in the belt and suspenders approach so I have a host file manager, a subscription to updated lists, several ad-blocking / tracker-blocking extensions AND the PiHole running.
