[Note : I'm really unsure where to post this - it involves browsers, networks, Raspberry Pi, Linux... please move if I've chosen the wrong place]
There's been a few security scares recently around ads in web pages, unscrupulous people can game the advert marketing system such that very reputable websites are caused to carry malicious ads that may infect your computer with malware.
Whilst I understand and appreciate the reason for ads being there, some websites are almost unusable because of the sheer number of obscuring ads.
For a long time I've been using adblocker in Chrome, which works very well. However, it does slow down browsing a little bit. It also needs to be installed on each device, so won't automatically work on tablets, phones etc on your network.
I read recently about Pi-Hole, a network wide ad blocker that runs on a Raspberry Pi. It's really quite clever, certainly speeds up browsing, perhaps doesn't block everything as well as adblocker does.
As it's network-wide, it redirects known ad-sites to a blank local image - the ads are never downloaded, the website loads much faster from any device accessing your local network.
It also gives some nice stats on it's server page (see attached image)
If you've got a spare Raspberry Pi, I think it's worth trying out - and I'd be interested what others think of it.
This is the website for it (it's free)
https://pi-hole.net/but installation is really simple :
Download the latest Raspbian-Lite from Raspberry Pi website, put it on SD card and boot the pi with it.
Type
curl -L install.pi-hole.net | bash
Answer the questions in the setup script (you need to give the Raspberry Pi a fixed ip address)
Then either configure each computer/device on your network to use the Pi-Hole Raspberry Pi as a DNS server with it's fixed ip address, or change the DNS servers list on your router such that DHCP tells all your devices to use Pi-Hole for the DNS server.
It's still being developed, at the moment it doesn't auto-update itself, and I'm not clear if it even auto-updates the blacklist and whitelists of websites it should block (I occasionally run the shell script to do this manually).
I like it, and you might too, if you like tinkering
Ian