I tried out The Independent with a popular "modern" browser
I found I could browse and read really fast if I just controlled DNS^1
I did not use an ad blocker.
I did not disable Javascript.
What I did was limit the available DNS information to a single domain, www.independent.co.uk
I experienced no significant delays or resource usage.
I was able to read the news no problem, fonts and formatting looked fine
There generally were no ugly image placeholders just white space
I tried blocking the ICO(1), PNG(2) and WOFF2(24) files. The page still looked great
The images are hosted on static.independent.co.uk
The video I suspect is hosted on a third party site, tracked and linked to adtech
I can easily download the images if I am really curious to see them but most images on news pages, unless they are photojournalism, are garbage, IMO
Anyway, I think it is quite easy to avoid all the tracking and ads, even without an ad blocker or disabling JS
The only things that "broke" on this website was the image display, offsite video sourcing and comments. Basically all the cruft :)
1. Truth is I did not even use DNS, the IP address was loaded into the memory of a loopback-bound proxy. No cookies were sent. No user-agent was sent. The only headers sent were Host and Connection
Are you familiar with running daemons? There are many different ones that can suffice.
The other question is browser you are using. I always assume the browser will ignore /etc/hosts. Otherwise the HOSTS file can provide a quick way to try this out.
Comments
I tried out The Independent with a popular "modern" browser
I found I could browse and read really fast if I just controlled DNS^1
I did not use an ad blocker.
I did not disable Javascript.
What I did was limit the available DNS information to a single domain, www.independent.co.uk
I experienced no significant delays or resource usage.
I was able to read the news no problem, fonts and formatting looked fine
There generally were no ugly image placeholders just white space
I tried blocking the ICO(1), PNG(2) and WOFF2(24) files. The page still looked great
The images are hosted on static.independent.co.uk
The video I suspect is hosted on a third party site, tracked and linked to adtech
I can easily download the images if I am really curious to see them but most images on news pages, unless they are photojournalism, are garbage, IMO
Anyway, I think it is quite easy to avoid all the tracking and ads, even without an ad blocker or disabling JS
The only things that "broke" on this website was the image display, offsite video sourcing and comments. Basically all the cruft :)
1. Truth is I did not even use DNS, the IP address was loaded into the memory of a loopback-bound proxy. No cookies were sent. No user-agent was sent. The only headers sent were Host and Connection
"limit the available DNS information to a single domain"
I would like to do this too, how did you go about doing it?
There are a number of different ways of doing it.
Are you familiar with running daemons? There are many different ones that can suffice.
The other question is browser you are using. I always assume the browser will ignore /etc/hosts. Otherwise the HOSTS file can provide a quick way to try this out.
Which daemons exactly? What would be their role?