Block ads on any site

Why ad blocking is not one problem

An ad blocker looks like a single switch, but behind it are two very different techniques. Network filtering compares every outgoing request against a filter list and cancels the ones headed for an ad server. Nothing downloads, so the page gets measurably lighter and faster — this is where most of the speed gain comes from on news sites and forums. Cosmetic filtering handles what network rules can't: content that arrives through the site's own API, such as a "Sponsored" card in a Facebook feed or a promoted post on Reddit. Those items travel down the same pipe as the posts you asked for, so they have to be recognised and hidden after the fact, along with the empty container they leave behind.

First-party ad serving is the hard case. YouTube, Twitch and Hulu stitch ad segments into the same video stream as the content, delivered from the same domain your player is already talking to. There is no separate host to block, so the ad has to be detected in the manifest and skipped, or the stream re-requested from a path that doesn't carry ads. That work is platform-specific and it changes whenever the platform changes: this is precisely why YouTube can break every other blocker for a week and why NovaBlock ships a dedicated YouTube module rather than a generic rule set.

The browser matters too. On Chrome and other Chromium browsers, Manifest V3 removed the old blocking network API and replaced it with declarative rules the browser evaluates itself. That is faster and more private — the extension never sees your requests — but it caps how many rules can be active and forces filters to be compiled ahead of time rather than applied dynamically. NovaBlock was written against those constraints from the start instead of being ported to them, which is why it keeps blocking YouTube ads on Chrome while the classic MV2-era blockers are being wound down. Firefox still allows dynamic filtering, so a few edge cases behave slightly better there.

Cookie banners deserve their own mention, because they aren't advertising at all — they are consent interfaces bolted on by a third-party vendor. They can be removed reliably, and removing them without clicking "accept" means no consent is recorded either way. The same category covers newsletter modals, app-install interstitials and the sticky auto-playing video that follows you down an article. Nothing about these needs a paid plan.

Pick your platform above for the specifics, or start from your browser instead.

Frequently asked questions