I'm not technical enough, but why can't pihole do as much as ublock? It's at the router level before anything gets to the browser, it has all the same info the browser will eventually get.

Shouldn't it be theoretically possible to do the same?

[–] qaz@lemmy.world 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

It's at the router level

It’s a DNS server and does not have the same capabilities as the router

It has all the same info the browser will eventually get.

It does not. Not just because of the previous reason but also because most traffic is encrypted nowadays (https) which means that even the router can’t read/modify the traffic to the device.

Another issue is that some things blocked by uBlock are hard to detect with static analysis in comparison to reading the rendered HTML.

[–] vox@sopuli.xyz 5 points 9 months ago

pihole does not deceypt https traffic, so it cant change dom. even if it could, it can't modify stuff added by js.
also it can only block whole domains, not individual urls

[–] teatowel@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

uBlock has direct access to the DOM and so can modify what the browser renders. For example, YouTube ads are hosted on the same domains as their videos and so PiHole cannot block them, but uBlock can.

[–] madcaesar@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I don't understand why tho, what is it that let's unblock distinguish ad video vs real video?

[–] RippleEffect@lemm.ee 1 points 9 months ago

Unlock can read the code being sent to your browser and act accordingly. It's much more granular.

Pihole can only see you're going to YouTube.com. It cannot see what YouTube is sending you.