Adfree stopping some pages from loading

[flamer]

I know this is a known issue, but I would like to know if there is a better solution than uninstalling or disabling/reverting adfree android..

problem: With adfree installed, regardless of what browser you use, certain webpages (for me it seems to be large webpages) will stop loading about 50% of the way. when this happens the browser becomes unresponsive, no new pages will load and you have to close or force close the browser and start again to load anything, with adfree android disabled you won't have this issue.

I am not sure why this happens, but I would like to know if there are settings I can change in adfree android to stop this happening, or if there will be an update that can fix this. If anyone can explain what the cause for this is, then maybe I can figure it out a bit more myself, adfree android just replaces the host records of known advertising domains with the localhost IP address of the phone, and the only thing I can think of is that on a page with a lot of advertisements the phone is hitting some sort of max tcp connection limit.. but that is just a guess.

 

[zuben el genub]

I don't know about Android and Adfree, but I use Adblock and Noscript on Firefox and some sites will NOT load unless you allow doubleclick and its ilk.

If Adfree is blocking one of those info gathering cookies, the page won't load.

 

[Mr. Lucky]

If the site in question loads ads via a script, the script may be looking for an acknowledgement that the ad loaded before proceeding further. If it never loads, the script never completes, and thus the problem you are encountering. You may be able to circumvent this by enabling the Local Webserver option in AdFree. Another (more tedious) option is to examine the source code of the page that is failing. See if you can detrermine the hostname of the ad server and then manually edit it out of the hosts file that AdFree is using (most likely in /system/etc).

Alternatively, I have a hosts file that will probably solve your problem (it solved mine). PM me your email address if interested.

 

[flamer]

Interesting you both seem to come to the same conclusion, I would of thought it would have been more logical to redirect the user somewhere telling them they need to disable ad blocking if the loading of ads failed. for me the website just stops loading about halfway. I use adblock plus on my desktop on the same website and have no such issues.

I have sent you a PM for a copy of your hosts file, I might have a muck round with my own one and see what adfree does to it, I suspect any changes you make are overwritten every update so I might have to update it manually myself going forward (also means one less application running though)

 

[zuben el genub]

I use NoScript more than Adblock. There's always a whole list of places that want to have permission. One is Doubleclick, Googleadservices, Quantserve and a whole lot more. I start with the main scripts like the site itself. Then Google or Yahooapis, maybe Facebook, then possibly one of the ad serve or tracking sites. Usually it gets to the ad/tracking sites and that's enough. If it's a site that is selling something, I'm gone and they lost a possible sale.

Bing, Groupon are blocked by the firewall and in the hosts file. Doubleclick is blocked by the firewall. I think a lot of ads must be using Bing as I see a lot of boxes that something was blocked by Online Armor.