What does this mean for Ad-blockers like UOrigin which were removed after Apple disabled the API they used?

I'm going to be downvoted for saying this but... ublock origin actually does slow down rendering your webpage. I think that it's sad that there seems to be so much pushback from vendors in regards to options like ublock origin, but I have found equally impressive results with system wide options like adguard without it reducing the speed of pages rendering.

surround

Yes, I’m going to downvote you, but only because you misunderstand how ad blocking works. uBlock does marginally slow down webpage render because it has to inject CSS rules (cosmetic filters) to improve blocking quality. If you don’t want this feature, you can disable cosmetic filtering entirely within uBlock’s settings.

The problem with AdGuard is that they charge for system-wide blocking which can be done for free with a hosts file or pi-hole.

ameshkov

Let me please chime in. As AdGuard developer, I'd like to comment on what you said and explain some details about how it works.

First of all, AdGuard desktop and mobile apps are quite different from hosts files or pi-hole. For instance, they're also able to apply cosmetic rules. Also, and this is really important on Android (unfortunately we can't do that on iOS), AdGuard is able to apply different rules depending on which app makes a request.

The common example is dealing Facebook Audience network. If you need to block Facebook ads in third-party apps with Pi-Hole, you'll have Facebook official apps broken as well. With AG, you can keep the official FB app working and block it in third-party apps at the same time.

Second, on every platform save for iOS, AdGuard filters every network connection and not just DNS queries. There're already multiple examples of apps (for instance, TikTok) that switch to using DOH when they detect that there's DNS filtering messing with their domains. Eventually, every network-level blocker, pi-hole included, will have to control all connections as DNS simply won't be enough.

Regarding Pi-Hole, we actually maintain a free and open source alternative called AdGuard Home: https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome