Guerilla Web Browsing

It is a sad fact of modern life that too many websites are hostile towards visitors in one way or another. Sometimes this may not be immediately obvious, depending on where in the world you are or how you’re accessing the website.

The most obvious signs of hostility are the nagging overlays imploring you to turn off your ad-blocker, to sign up for a newsletter, to create an account, to subscribe to a service.

Only slightly less obnoxious are the requests to allow tracking, not just for the site you’re visiting but also a myriad of others whose code runs on the pages. Depending on the site and the particularly stack of surveillance tech it uses, this may be trivially easy to decline or require multiple clicks to achieve.

But the worst act of hostility, to my mind, is the one that you only see if you’re on a slower connection, a less powerful device or without any ad-blocker or tracker-blocker installed. I refer to the lengthy load time due to the mass of JavaScript code that, for whatever reason, needs to be loaded in order for the web page to even display.

Like many of you, I’ve used ad-blockers for years now, but these are only a partial solution to the ills I’ve described above, and advertising networks are doing their level best to outflank such tools.

Increasingly, I’ve turned to a multi-pronged approach to taking back control of my web browsing.

1. First, and most importantly, I segregate any activities involving services provided by Google* within a separate web browser to the one that I use for regular browsing.
2. Next, I use NextDNS to disable tracking sites at the network level. A Pi-Hole could do the same thing, but NextDNS has the advantage that it’s not limited to the boundaries of my home.
3. Within the browser, I use various extensions to mop up and hide any residual annoyances through a combination of CSS rules and selective disabling of JavaScript.

Overkill? Perhaps. But I’m firmly of the belief that the only way to truly tame the ad-tech companies is to literally starve them of the data they crave, by whatever means necessary. They show no inclination to change their ways otherwise, and regard legislation as at best an annoyance to be neutralised or watered down, or at worst a business expense.

(*Facebook would also be in that segregated container if I were still using.)