Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I used to be a big fan of Opera back when it was good but I wouldn't recommend using anything made by them since they got bought out by a shady Chinese company that makes their money off of predatory payday loan apps with exploitative interest rates in a few developing nations. Firefox (and Mull and the like) are the best Android web browsers but if you really want a Chromium-based one then I'd recommend looking into using one that's open source and not owned by an unethical corporation.

Been using dnsforge.de along with ublock origin on fennec. Seems to work well enough, but I might go back to personalDNSfilter to block ads with local VPN if i notice anything slipping through

Blokada.

Use firefox and simply deal with the slightly slower app?

Pihole + firefox + ublock for adds here. Im not using this, but its also possible to set your home server connect to VPN provider and then route all traffic through that. Then you can use your selfhosted VPN to connect with phone and use both at the same time. Or just enable add blocking on your VPN provider, I guess most of them have one

Setting up a PiHole is a method that should work. Costs a bit if you don't already have something to host it on.

I use the Samsung browser with the Adguard plug-in, which works great with customizable filter lists.

Samsung browser: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sec.android.app.sbrowser
Adguard for samsung browser: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adguard.android.contentblocker

I recommend cromite's (fork of bromite) adblocking. It works well and I don't see ads (at least the big ones, maybe I overlooked some smaller ones)

If you don't mind paying, Blokada has a "cloud" subscription. You set your DNS settings on the phone to what they give you, turn it on in the app once, then it runs without using the VPN method.

I use it because, even though it's another God damn subscription, it seems to work better for me and now I don't have to think about it.

Iceraven

Im not very familiar with Opera but do you have the "Allow Acceptable Ads™" setting still on?

Edit: I just used an ad block testing site with Allow Acceptable Ads turned off and tracker blocking and the score it got is about the same as firefox mobile with ublock

Firefox is a bit slow because it's busy blocking those ads and other garbage then figuring out how to make a web page with what little is leftover. You might be a bit slow if you can't figure that out.

If you don't want firefox, Cromite is pretty good. Also if you need your vpn for other things, then the next best thing is a custom dns, I use nextdns which is customisable and blocks a fair amount of stuff.

firefox beta with ublock.
if you use beta, you can install any extensions by adding them to an AMO extension collection.

also make sure to get some sort of dns ad blocker for blocking in-app ads/trackers and vendor tracking:
you have three options:

• Self-hosted: Pihole
• Cloud: NextDNS (this is what I'm using)
• Local: AdAway (drains battery unless you have root)

And that is the reason why I'm rooted and you should be to. Also if you want to add firewall into combination with vpn and adblock, there is definitely no other way.