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[tubaman]

Over the years I have used:

• ISP provided. (Stopped using when their "nanny knows best" policy became apparent.)

...

[Edited to fix typo.]

Interestingly I use BT's DNS because of its parental control features.
 

[Alex Atkin UK]

Interestingly I use BT's DNS because of its parental control features.
 

I think its useful as an option, but to subject everyone to it even if everyone in the household are adults is frustrating.

The problem is on the big ISPs its never fully disabled, they have court ordered blocks on piracy and certain dodgy child related sites.  The latter is fair enough, except I don't trust these blocks to be implemented correctly as a few times they have accidentally blocked whole sites rather than specific iffy pages.  Plus I see it as pushing things further underground, the less people stumble onto bad things online, the less it will be reported and the easier it is for the government to just pretend it doesn't exist.

Most importantly it lures parents into a false sense of security that their child is safe online, which is far from the truth.

[Moderator edited to remove a stray [list] tag.]

[tubaman]

I think its useful as an option, but to subject everyone to it even if everyone in the household are adults is frustrating.

The problem is on the big ISPs its never fully disabled, they have court ordered blocks on piracy and certain dodgy child related sites.  The latter is fair enough, except I don't trust these blocks to be implemented correctly as a few times they have accidentally blocked whole sites rather than specific iffy pages.  Plus I see it as pushing things further underground, the less people stumble onto bad things online, the less it will be reported and the easier it is for the government to just pretend it doesn't exist.

Most importantly it lures parents into a false sense of security that their child is safe online, which is far from the truth.

Agree it's not perfect but is easy to switch off temporarily if needing to visit a site it doesn't like - to buy wine for example.
It will undoubtedly give some a false sense of security, but I just look at it as a useful measure to make bad stuff a bit harder to stumble upon.
 

[Moderator edited to remove a stray [list] tag.]

[Weaver]

I said ‘they’re all pretty good’ meaning in performance terms, something which I now have doubts about. I have a reasonably high latency because of my DSL itself, minimum 42 ms to bottomless.aa.net.uk (over IPv6), and distance to London in any case, so this rather overwhelms the individual DNS provider differences.

[Alex Atkin UK]

At the end of the day, the biggest bottleneck (assuming you aren't using adblock) tends to be looking up adverts and rendering the page.  Makes it pretty hard to notice any difference from DNS.  Plus like I said, routers cache the results and they have a lot more RAM than they used to so likely maintain a larger cache.

[maxheadroom]

I have ditched google and am giving cloudflare another go seems quite snappy and as  the cat said earlier

Google. (Stopped using due to their obsession in documenting and archiving everything.)

[aesmith]

At the end of the day, the biggest bottleneck (assuming you aren't using adblock) tends to be looking up adverts and rendering the page.  Makes it pretty hard to notice any difference from DNS.  Plus like I said, routers cache the results and they have a lot more RAM than they used to so likely maintain a larger cache.

My router caches, and acts as DNS server for the home network, because I have specifically enabled and configured that function. DNS caching isn't necessarily an inherent function of routers in general, or not of any that I have worked with.

[burakkucat]

My router caches, and acts as DNS server for the home network, because I have specifically enabled and configured that function.

Likewise.

[Alex Atkin UK]

My router caches, and acts as DNS server for the home network, because I have specifically enabled and configured that function. DNS caching isn't necessarily an inherent function of routers in general, or not of any that I have worked with.

Most routers in my experience run dnsmasq for DHCP and DNS caching as its a lightweight solution to both problems.

Easy enough to tell, if the router issues you a DNS of its own IP then its almost certainly got some amount of DNS caching going on, vs if it issues your ISPs DNS directly then obviously not.