The solution is to stop visiting these sites entirely, as traffic emboldens them further.
It's like deliberately going into The Worst Toilet In Scotland so you can read the news scribbled on the walls.
I see you’re saying that it obviates the needs for manual central curation. But surely we would move to (stronger) LLMs doing the curation centrally while using existing infrastructure, before trying to insert a LLM round-trip before every page fetch.
Centralised curation will have its time but marketers will move to systems which are unique to each visitor. Think 30 second ads which are unique to each visitor, built on their shopping history, social media comments, search, etc. These systems are currently prohibitively expensive to build and deploy, but they won't be with cheap LLMs. YouTube is already experimenting with ads inside streams, for example. Those are very difficult or impossible to deterministically block. Sites will get very good at agentically evading deterministic adblocking software. This is where local LLMs will shine. Consider the case of YouTube in-steam ads. The LLM could probabilistically determine that the current frames are ads (even though this particular ad is 100% unique to that visitor, and has never appeared in any ad database before), then black out the section of the screen/audio while it plays. Or fast forward until it finds where the segment ends. All in real-time, locally determined.
It does become a strange cat and mouse game in the future, but I feel quite strongly that ad blocking will win. Users will have intelligent, autonomous systems on their devices which can curate and block content as desired.
It burns through tokens/electricity.
In all seriousness, far too many people think "throw AI at it" will solve every tech problem. AI remains inefficient, power hungry and mercurial. Replacing an adblocker or firewall with a constantly-running AI is as efficient and useful as rocket motors on a car.
Why would that be is own browser instead of a plugin? And his will it accumulate significant market share?
It's possible we will see an "AI first" browser (whatever this means) that gets significant market share. But getting rid of ads will not be a driver for that.
cloudflare.com
connatix.com
d34azmi6bxg5fz.cloudfront.net
videos-cloudfront-usp.jwpsrv.com
facebook.net
google.com
googletagmanager.com
gstatic.com
jwpcdn.com
jwplatform.com
jwplayer-dualstack.map.fastly.net
assets-jpcust.jwpsrv.com
jwplayer.com
jwpltx.com
jwpsrv.com
parsely.com
sail-horizon.com
servenobid.com
wp.com
The internet has been unbearable without it for years now. I can't imagine having to face it every day as most people do.
On iOS, Brave browser makes toggling JS particularly easy.
90% of my mobile web browsing is without JavaScript. It’s much faster, cleaner, safer. And for the occasional website that needs JS, I can toggle it.
Similar to many here in the thread, I then tend to not visit sites anymore that require JS/are too bloated.
The modern web is getting worse by the day. Not coincidentally, I find myself using it less and less.
Yup. Its getting to the point where folks send me links and I just reply "I don't or can't use that website" and I move on. Nothing is lost, I feel.
So, when blocking javascript (which uBo can also do of course) does not work, enable javascript with Medium Mode (blocks 3th party scripts and frames.)
(personally i use Librewolf.)
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode#medium-...
I also run librewolf on several machines, but have even more issues with cloudflare then. It's all just sad all around.
Either it's bad AI coverart (bonus points for 'glamming it up' with a 'sexy lady' as your stream photo to lure desperate men in), or it loads into a stream with some random middle-aged chud trying to hawk bad baseball cards for "$2 starts!" as you're trying to scroll through the listings.
And if that doesn't work, use reader view (as you always should)