Dear GrapheneOS Team,

Please consider native ad/tracker blocking in Vanadium. While I understand the team’s preference for private DNS solutions, my specific home network configuration presents challenges that make that approach difficult.

I rely on my custom home DNS server for internal IP overrides for reachability of my home services, and an ad-blocking DNS would negatively impact other users on my network. Also, I can’t override the global private DNS setting in GrapheneOS for my home WiFi. VPNs are not a viable alternative to me either due to complexity and potential conflicts with my home server and DNS.

Furthermore, I believe DNS-based blocking is inherently limited, as it cannot reliably filter all ads and trackers due to the need for URL pattern matching beyond domain names. Similar to DNS, using VPN as ad blocker would go beyond the purpose of a VPN as well, therefore I consider it a bad solution.

I'm currently using Ironfox and an extension for ad and tracker blocking, but I would love to switch to Vanadium. I believe native ad/tracker blocking within Vanadium would be a more effective and flexible solution, which I heard the GrapheneOS Team is already working on, but I wanted you to know about my own reasoning, which is why I opened this discussion.

I've read similar topics and considered them all:

Thank you for your consideration.

    SirWolf Please consider native ad/tracker blocking in Vanadium.

    To the best of my knowledge, Vanadium already has ad blocking. No need to use any DNS blocking solution.

        ryrona

        To the best of my knowledge, Vanadium already has ad blocking.

        Yes it has:

        It's [Ad blocking] enabled by default and the toggle is to disable it per-site. It uses EasyList + EasyPrivacy as the baseline and also EasyList Germany when the German language is enabled as part of work towards adding support for a bunch of language specific filters.

        source: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/19619-ad-blocking-in-vanadium/19

        and

        Vanadium has a proper network-level ad blocking implementation. It does not have complex dynamic rules or cosmetic filtering via CSS at the moment. YouTube ads can't be blocked with declarative network-based filtering but rather require invasive changes to the site which are regularly changed to keep up with it changing.

        source: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/19619-ad-blocking-in-vanadium/18

        You can access the setting by opening a website in Vanadium and clicking on the page info icon (to the left of the link in the url field)> Permissions> Ads