Pi-hole has helped improve my “relationship” with Firefox, or better phrased with Firefox forks like LibreWolf and Tor browser. Cool thing with Pi-hole is that you can watch the query log and see what happened in the background while you were surfing the Internet. I learned that :

  • After removing the sponsored shortcuts in Firefox and putting your own shortcuts there Firefox will make connections each time you start the browser. So, if you would have icons on your quick start page in Firefox for let’s say EFF, Lemmy, Mastodon, HackerNews, with each Firefox start up, it would query these sites. which I didn’t like so much. Since then I’ve gone back to a complete blank start page, removing search and all those quick start icons, using just toolbar folders with bookmarks.

  • Pi-hole blocks telemetry for Firefox and Thunderbird.

  • Signal uses Google servers. I thought that they were Amazon servers, but looking at the history of Signal hosting I learned that they went back to Google.

  • Firefox push notification services are hosted on Google servers. LibreWolf removes a lot of Google things that Firefox has by default, but not the push parts.

  • oxomoxo@lemmy.world
    0·
    5 months ago

    DNS services with blocks lists such as Pi-Hole, AdGuard, NextDNS, etc, provide a centralized config file for all devices on a network, so you only configure once, collect statistics, have built in block lists that can be easily modified and updated either automatically or manually and are fast.

    Using large lists in a host file will slow local resolution. It wasn’t designed for this use case as it’s acting a flat file database with a limited amount of RAM allocated for the process and will get slower the longer the list. While this latency won’t be noticeable in the thousands of lines, once you start hitting hundreds of thousand or millions of entries it will start to crawl.

    Hosts file are also unable to RegEx or Wildcard entries which means you would have to duplicated lots of variations in domains…

    I mean I can also statically assign IPs to ever client and keep a spreadsheet, but why don’t I just use DHCP?