Details about my system: Simple config - main router directs all DNS to Rpi4B standalone Pi-Hole. That’s it.
What I have changed since installing Pi-hole: Just updated router’s OpenWRT OS using Attended-SysUpgrade which maintains config and settings. Been operating Pi-hole for about a year keeping Rpi’s OS, Pi-hole, Gravity all up to date while adding domains that were not already in the Lists. The Pi-hole employs a periodic cron to reboot on a schedule during the wee hours of the night when one might also get up to wee.
While looking into this using browser Inspect tools to determine the href of ads I find more and more sites employing scripts to populate the ad data. Now, would these scripts also run in the local browser page and seek DNS via the local system? The answer seems like it should be Yes but the evidence suggest that the answer is No based on the plethora of ads now appearing but thought it worth asking.
I did note some improvement by clearing the DNS setting of the Router and resetting it to the Pi-hole address but the improvement was small.
Pi-hole blocking passes the google/flurry tests yet ads are everywhere.
Mobile devices, at least for the sites I use, tend to already have minimal ad content so not noticing a change with those. Switching the mobile device’s browser to desktop mode does not appear to incur additional ad damage. Hmm, that’s curious.
On desktop PC browsers; Firefox, Brave, Edge the desktop sites are incurring huge banners and other excrement that haven’t been present before.
Are you certain those desktop browsers aren’t bypassing your Pi-hole? I think some of them, out of the box, want to use their own DoH or did at one time.
Check your advanced settings via URLs like about:config and chrome://flags or edge://flags to disable all sorts of stuff like QUIC and A-Sync DNS and all that crap apart from the already mentioned DoH/DoT things which sometimes can also be disabled via the regular Settings menu
There are simply too many things you have to keep an eye on these days when fighting against annoying ads on the internet sadly…
Wow, sad how the brain fades. I’d forgotten that the impacts of KB5074109 required some significant OS repair. So, after re-checking the browser’s internal DNS settings I found that they'd all were set to do their OWN things. Reset all browsers to use the router’s gateway address that fwds to the Pi-hole. The problem is much improved/normal again.
