Just bought and tried (in this order): Crystal, Purify and Peace. Each has features to like. Crystal has a great price and is the only one to let you report an ad not blocked or broken page so that the ad block list can be updated. Purify lets you block scripts and images on top of font-blocking options also in Peace. Crystal missed an ad that Purify (and Peace) caught, but Peace was the only one that seriously removed all the cruft causing slowdowns, even Google+ news site pop ups and like button pinned banners from The Verge in addition to blocking ads. So my recommendations are Crystal for price, Peace for well, exactly what it says on the tin, and Purify if you'd like to block images and scripts also. Check screenshots of each for the latest on their preference panels.
Keep in mind that there will be zillions of these in short order and many will also be free. Since they all use the same Apple-provided matching/blocking engine, there isn't going to be much in the way of innovation there - there won't be a content blocker that is 3 times faster and uses a quarter of the memory of some other content blocker.
It'll be down to config UI and the quality of their rules - the rules are all going to be derived from publicly available rule lists. There will very likely be publicly available lists in Apple's format quite soon as well.
Marco Ament comes out looking best on the last point by being completely upfront about where the rules in his blocker come from.
I would add to that responsiveness in updating rulesets, ability to add your own rules (especially graphical) or customize rule sets by country, and security features like noscript or phishing warnings as possible ways others could stand out in future. We might end up seeing special purpose Content Blockers, site-specific ones...
It will be interesting to see if Adblock Fast can be faster. It says it only uses 7 "rules", that I think someone said must be machine compiled, and it's arriving today on iOS9 as well. It may not have a great database, though.
I guess that a fart app should probably not cost anything since it's quite useless, but I do believe that it's a problem that on day one of a whole new App Store category, the first app launched, Crystal (it appeared hours before Purify and Peace for me anyways) is a free app. That's how you make mobile apps an unsustainable business.
I don't know how much work has gone into making these content blocker apps, but I bet it has taken some time - time that in any "normal" business would be charged for, and I think mobile apps creators should charge more for their apps too. In my experience, there are two types of mobile apps consumers. Those that won't pay for an app, whether it costs $1, $10 or $20, and those that will, and I think it would be healthier for the ecosystem to cater at least as much to the latter group as the former, but I don't think that's currently the case.
You assume that every app developer is out to make money. This is not more true than that every PC application developer is out to make money. Some people make free software and gives it away for free. That's not a race to the bottom, unless you think Linux being free is a race to the bottom against Windows.
For some reason AppStore has surprisingly low amount of free software. It's either free with ads, free with in-app purchases or paid. Or free software missing marketing and it's hard to find it in AppStore or popular ratings.
Meanwhile in another part of the world, a dazzling array of free software if available - just check repos like github et al. It might be a race, but it does not seem to head for the bottom. It has long since passed the apple-world in market penetration.
Money is only one of the motivators for writing software. It might be the prime motivator in the apple world (producers and consumers alike) but it by no means the only one.
Only one of these apps is free - Crystal. And it says it's temporary right on the App Store page and why. The author is making an entirely conscious, clear-eyed business decision. Here's a bit from the email he sent to his testers:
A big thank you to all 1200 of the testers who have helped shape Crystal into a solid application. I'm sorry to everyone else who didn't get a spot to test it, but the good news is, you can try it now for free!
Why Free? I want everyone to experience Crystal for themselves so as a thank you to my early adopters, I've decided to make it free for a very limited time.
Whats the catch? No catch, but I would like to request you help me out with Rating, Sharing, a quick survey or donating a little money below, I do have a wife & 2 kids to feed
Perhaps there's a race to the bottom in mobile apps but it probably produces more useful things than the race to tut-tut the decisions or generosity of others.
I should clarify: Among people that don't use credit cards like kids or the paranoid, the typical solution is to use a gift card. I, personally, do not like to use credit cards for purchases less than 40$. I certainly didn't think my comment was worthy of downvoting, especially since the comment I replied to asked if it was required.
I dunno. On other platforms (Windows, OSX, Android, etc) ad blockers are just free browser plugins. While I'm sure there's a place for paid options on platforms where devs have the ability to differentiate with some "killer feature", it seems like the iOS options are the equivalent of the different AdBlock variants (Plus/Edge/Origin/et al).
I feel like in the case of an adblocker, there's precedent for that to be free. They're freely available -and- more powerful on the desktop, so why should anyone pay for a less powerful, but still useful version on their phone/tablet? That's just silly
You know these apps rely on very very long lists of domains to be blocked that lots of people have gathered during the course of years and that the developers of those adblocker apps just took those lists for free? So that's what those apps should cost.
That's incorrect. Peace for example negotiated a contract with it's rule list provider (Ghostery) to share profits. So this will help Ghostery to maintain a quality list. I'm not sure that the other blockers haven't negotiated similar arrangements. Unattributed accusations of leeching aren't very kind.
That said, none are perfect. Swapping between all three and reloading Slate.com, it seemed impossible to block an after-page-load ad inserted at the top of the article via JS.
Except when I ran Purify with Scripts disabled on Slate, then the page loaded instantly with no ad for obvious reasons. (Sadly Purify is missing an extension to selectively enable JS.)
Searching the store, Blockr looks nice enough, specifically calling out blocking of Cookie Warnings, but other than that, seems like a more configurable Crystal with features of Peace.
1Blocker which I have yet to use, currently takes the cake on configurability -- perhaps too much so -- it lets you turn on and off individual rules as well as add your own by typing in the filter directly.
Yes, I ultimately don't want to though for both performance and debugging purposes. If something goes wrong, I'd rather easily know who did it. But yes, I would prefer if say, a "no script" content blocker specifically focused on that, an "ad block" one on that, a "privacy" one too... You could also combine apps to block regional ad variants, maybe, if in future country-specific ones are developed. Running more than one might work best for something like 1Blocker as a way to add your own block rules...
You're comparing privacy invading, intrusive, battery draining, data chewing ad-networks, with a developer who asks you to pay a couple of bucks for something he's probably spent a month minimum developing.
Sorry, but no.
Those publishers have the option of asking their readers to pay for the content directly, which is exactly what the developer does.
They also have the option to use ad networks that aren't completely user-hostile.
PSA: If any content blocker is breaking a page you can touch the refresh button in mobile safari for 2 seconds and an option to reload the page without content blockers will appear.
One thing I like about Ghostery is the ability to block just beacons, tracking scripts etc while leaving ads available. Is this something Peace can do?
I am curious how this will impact the web. Ads are the only revenue stream for most of the sites. Blocking ads is good for user experience but when you think from publishers site how will they survive? "I like ads because I can support people I like without even spending a dime" said one of my friends. I cannot agree more because there are plenty of people on mid and small scale try to earn living with the content they provide.
So use an ad network that doesn't unnecessarily track me across the entire web, destroy my battery life, and make reading content (particularly on mobile) a game of 'find the article' amongst the shit storm of ads.
The number of things that everyday sites embed in their pages is phenomenal. The Ghostery extension gives a good idea about how much crap gets loaded.
6 tagged as 'analytics', 4 tagged as 'advertising', 3 tagged as 'social widgets'
That is a ridiculous amount of extra requests, extra data, and of course, tracking.
The advertising (and since the obsession with 'cloud' or 'SAAS', analytics too) industry has been fucking end-users for YEARS. Now users have a credible way to fight back, and suddenly it's "not fair?".
If you want advertising to fund your site/blog/whatever, use an ad network that doesn't try to digitally fuck me every time I visit your site.
If the site has too many ads for your taste, simply don't visit that site. You have some sense that you are entitled to whatever efforts the site owner has committed to bring you content (obviously enough effort to be interesting to you) without supporting them through the ad service they chose. If you don't like their ads, you could simply move on, but now you're taking the fruits of their labor without giving them the passive support they ask in return.
I'm not saying its right or wrong, but the attitude of "they did what I don't like, so im going to do x" is very much entitled...
So your suggestion is that instead of trying to convince these "publishers" (as people like to call them apparently) that they should use a less user-hostile ad/analytics solution, we should all just boycott their publications completely?
I bet they'd all love that - no visitors because of their shitty ad network choices, thus no costs right. They can eat their own failed dreams for dinner.
Is this the ad-blocking equivalent of "if you don't like the laws here, go to a different country" ??
The current situation is the equivalent of a physical store attaching a tracking device to everyone who looks at their window displays at force, and tracking every other store the person looks at.
In that analogy ad blocking is giving the guy trying to attach the tracking device a punch in the nose and stopping him.
As I've said, ads don't have to be so invasive and intrusive. If they acted responsibly we wouldn't be so adamant about blocking them.
So you must have the built-in pop-up blockers built into almost all browsers turned off too, right? Since that's the only non-hypocritical way to make the argument you're making.
No, because as a developer of a site, you know the defaults... if browsers defaulted to predictably blocking ads, content providers would adjust accordingly. There is a difference between a standard on pretty much every browser and an addon.
But those pop-up blockers weren't always the default, and when people started installing addons to Firefox back in the day to block them I kept hearing all these same arguments about how it was immoral and going to kill the publishing industry.
It's not an issue of morality. It's an issue of overstepping what's acceptable to someone clicking on a link, exactly the same as what happened to pop-ups and pop-unders.
That is crazy. I'm sorry, but if your business model depends on megabytes of JS and 20 seconds per-page of network activity on my mobile device, I'm going to block it if I can. And if your business model fails, that's not my problem.
It's not even the advertisements that are the issue. If everyone started just serving images and removed all of the JS coming down from these ad exchanges I would turn my ad blocker off.
(As an aside, it's a hilarious juxtaposition listening to the arguments about the taxi industry and why Uber killing them is for the best, at the same time as I'm hearing the arguments about how a random publisher should be able to decide how much code I'm going to allow to execute on my own personal device and me blocking it is immoral or entitled.)
Once you get a chance to decide if the page's ads are to your liking, though, you have already been tracked and had the ad network's code executed on your machine.
You are absolutely right. Abusing clients is not acceptable. I just wanted to start discussion from publisher's point of view. I am just trying to ask if it is fair to punish people for bad attitude of ad networks. If it is than another solution shall be proposed and forcing people to create native apps is not one of them.
edit: additional comment
> I am just trying to ask if it is fair to punish people for bad attitude of ad networks.
Publishers should ask themselves whether they are in the business of providing quality content to consumers, or in the business of sharing revenue with advertisers. Deciding which side of this line they fall on will help them make the right choices.
> if it is fair to punish people for bad attitude of ad networks
Site operators choose the ad networks they use, so yes, it is fair to 'punish' people for choosing to affiliate themselves with bad-actors.
> than another solution shall be proposed
Non-invasive analytics (i.e. a single company logging who visits its own site(s) using Piwik or OWA) are generally not blocked, and non-tracking ad networks needn't necessarily be blocked on privacy grounds.
Case in point, regarding /good/ advertising: Project Wonderful. I'm happy to whitelist their ads, as I've discovered quite a number of good webcomics through them.
Yet, such genuine targeting (not blindly matching keywords) seems to've attracted little attention from the ad industry - instead, all we get is more AdWords (unintrusive, just fairly useless, and occasionally amusingly inappropriate) and the likes of Outbrain (responsible for the "From Around the Web" ads).
Personally I expect that the main thrust of the (inevitable) push-back will be a mechanism whereby cookies and ads are pushed from within the content site's actual domain. How that will occur and what exact from the back-end will need to take is something I am not sure about but I am sure far more intelligent and able people than I are hot on the topic.
Ultimately, that's exactly what we (the users) want - in particular, becayse cookies are per-domain only, this prevents any and all cross-domain tracking.
You have no idea about ad network at all. "unnecessarily track"? Tracking is the only way to make the ad relevant to you and increase the ad's value so you actually see fewer ads and those ads fund better content. Without any tracking, you gonna see at least tripled amount of ads on the most popular websites today in order to generate same amount of revenue. And BTW, everything between "you land on a webpage" and "ad network decided which ad to serve" happens in about 100ms or less, like you can really notice it?! Complain about ads when you actually pay for subscription rather than asking for "workaround links" when you try to read a WSJ article posted on HN next time.
If your site has recipes, cooking tips etc, you don't need to track my activity across the web, to know that I'm interested in cooking, and may want to buy cooking related items. Magazine based advertising has worked on this concept for literally decades.
I never asked for a "workaround". Honestly the only reason I wanted to see the article is to identify if the article is as ridiculous as the title implied, so why would I buy a subscription for a publisher that puts out shit like that?
That's exactly why I said you don't understand what targeted advertisement can do. Let's talk about 3 concepts:
1) Relevance. Take your cooking website example, say if that recipes has chicken in it. Then the magazine method can show you an ad about local supermarket for you to buy chicken. Then how do they know if you "probably" prefer walmart or wholefoods or local farmer's market? What if you are an organic guy? (which means you probably prefer wholefoods) Traditional magazine method doesn't make the result relevant enough for today's online advertising standard.
2) Feedback. As a brand who wanna do an online campaign, how do I know if my advertisement works? Today's advertiser no longer count on clicks, they count on impression. They don't need you to click to ad. They just want to make sure you see it. How do they if you didn't block to ad? How do they know if you didn't go to other tabs when their 15 second youtube ad is playing? That means at least 1 additional request send out from your browser. Usually it's more because they wanna know if you watched half of the video or the whole video. Things above don't have to be done with tracking you profile, but the other things does. For example, how to the advertisers know if they reach their target audience? If I'm selling the new mustang how do I know if I show the ad to ford people instead of chevy people? It's called on target percentage and it's one of the top metrics advertisers care about.
3) Availability. In many situations, there's just no ad available that actually relevant to the content. Then it's better for advertisers to show you something that may relevant to you instead of something completely random or no ad at all.
Your magazine method has works for decades doesn't mean it will continue to work in the future. Does magazine itself still work?
BTW, when I raise the WSJ thing I didn't target you specifically and I have no idea you had that comment you posted before. But as you said, you (and probably most people) won't pay for subscription for such ridiculous publication. Then advertisement is the way for you to read it freely so you can identify if the article is ridiculous or not. Or maybe just don't read it and comment by title?
I don't care what they "can do". It's fucking creepy and I'll never accept it.
A site can just as easily say "show me ads for <page specific tags> as hard-coded "recipes", and knowing where I shop just goes into the creepy factor even more.
Okay if I understand correctly, you just hate targeting ads with tracking not any ads right? Then instead of using ad blocker, you can opt out from cookie tracking on NAI so all participating companies of NAI (which covers almost all major players in the ad network industry) will not use your cookie.
No, it isn't just privacy invasion that bothers me. Ridiculous screen-covering ads, bandwidth hogging, battery draining etc.
But forget all that - your suggestion, to avoid a tracking cookie from the various companies in what is frankly an industry with a terrible track record for doing the right thing, is to use the NAI "don't track me" "feature"... Which requires that I accept cookies from any domain and let them put a cookie on my device?
Are you aware of how stupid I would have to be, to believe that works?
I work for one of the ad network. And I know the people in my company who implemented that specific piece of code for that specific opt-out feature. It's one of the most safety-critical feature we have so we do regression test before every single release regardless if we modified that code or not. So I'm pretty sure that opt-out feature works. Because if it doesn't, someone gonna sue us.
I find it really hard to communicate with you because before we even start this discussion you seems already tagged the entire ad industry as an "evil empire" who try to steal your personal information all the time. The ad industry is not an angle for sure. It's just a business that try to make money, like any other business. Intentionally ruin people's life is not the interest of any mature business. Believe or not, doing things that make people hate ads is the last thing the ad industry wants. Because the more everyone hate ads, the less effective those ad campaigns will be, and the less ad companies get paid. Most of the problems with ads today are not introduced in favor of anybody, it's just not as easy as you might think to find a overall better way. Do you recall how many years it has been for people to actually produce a practical substitution for gas engine since everyone realize it's messing up our planet?
In the end, I'm interest to hear your vision on how to fund high quality online contents today without the profit of targeted advertisement.
> I find it really hard to communicate with you because before we even start this discussion you seems already tagged the entire ad industry as an "evil empire" who try to steal your personal information all the time.
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, its a fucking duck. The Ad industry doesn't try to steal peoples information all the time, they successfully create very detailed profiles on people. You yourself admitted this when claiming that "only targeted advertising is effective".
> So I'm pretty sure that opt-out feature works.
...for the ad networks who are members of NAI and who abide by its guidelines... by requiring a cookie on every device I use, and requiring that every device is set to allow third-party cookies, which further increases the chances for me to be tracked online.
Ad this point, I don't need to demonstrate the shady practices of the ad industry - they do that well enough by themselves.
I don't care if you work for an ad company, and frankly I don't care if the adoption of content blocking software causes your employer to go out of business and you to lose your job. You chose to work for that company, knowing full-well what they do.
The ad industry made choices about how it would operate its business, and is now paying the consequences. Same goes for you, as an individual.
Through out this entire conversation I was listen to your problems with ads and explain the ones you might misunderstand. You just simply don't believe in anything positive. And after all this you are now taking it personally?
Magazines and bus stop ads have worked for decades without knowing more about me than that I read a particular magazine for example. Small time outlets didn't advertise in magazines and bus stops in the past, so it's quite likely that small blogs and similar outlets with less than (say) a few hundred thousand unique visitors per day will no longer be able to support themselves via advertising, even to just cover hosting. The solution will be to aggregate into larger networks (medium etc) or rely on donations/subscriptions/affiliate links etc.
I don't want "targeted" "relevant" ads related to what I wrote on Facebook yesterday or what I googled last Tuesday. Ever. I'll just have to live with whatever content people can afford to show me without such ads. I really don't feel sorry for any ad network or any site that used them.
How about you consider the possibility that there are zero ads relevant to me. For as long as I can remember the only times I have clicked on an ad (on mobile) have been mistakes.
If ads make money based on click-throughs and purchases, then my blocking them has zero change in revenue generated. If they are simply displaying for brand awareness (less common on the web) then sure I'm having a minor impact but given that ads often ruin content enough to close the window (recent example being a floating banner covering half my screen and thus making article unreadable) I doubt there is positive brand impact anyway.
I didn't ask for relevant ads or privacy intrusions. And if your business model can be demolished by a bit of code that lets me selectively decide what I'm willing to view, it was never a good model anyway.
"The coming reckoning for publishers is not “because of Apple”. It’s because of the choices the publishers themselves made, years ago, to allow themselves to become dependent on user-hostile ad networks that slow down the web, waste precious device battery life, and invade our privacy. Apple has simply enabled us, the users who are fed up with this crap, to do something about it. If aggressive content blocking were enabled out of the box, by default, I could see saying the result is “because of Apple”. But it’s not. What’s about to happen is thus because of us, the users."
The impact is the same as when mail started to block spam. There will be a initial decrease and complain, followed by change to more professional behavior in the industry.
For example, mail news letter used to be sent out in mass to any email that the company has harvested. That tactic is now illegal, so they only send out to customers who has subscribed to it and the letter must have instructions on how to unsubscripted.
However, your friend do not actually support people if they don't also click on the ads and buy the products. Money don't get magically created, and people need to buy products before any content creator can get get compensated for supplying advertisement.
> That tactic is now illegal, so they only send out to customers who has subscribed to it and the letter must have instructions on how to unsubscripted.
Reputable people may do that but my mail server is still getting 1000s of spams a day.
Correct, and this is the business concept behind technology that is intended to block spam while still permitting the reputable mail passage to the user. One of the commonly argued reason to use gmail has been its spam blocking features.
This is a major problem that we are trying to solve with our app, Ad Control. Unfortunately the app is still waiting for review but it should be in the App Store soon.
It will make Google (the only ad company that actually outright steals personal data instead of acting nice and building Bayesian models) into a monopoly. You can't adblock the Google.
(Obviously I'm exaggerating for emotional impact, but the basic gist is true. This is not a good development for privacy on the Internet!)
Why not? I generally don't use Google services (certainly not their search), and (currently) Ghostery extension for Safari. I don't remember the last time I saw an ad, from any network, but certainly not Google.
Your earlier comment "you can't block .google.com" also doesn't really mean much, because ads on third-party sites are served from adclick.net and google-syndication.com - not from google.com.
Even if they changed that practice, and started using google.com to serve their ads - I'd happily block it. I don't want them to track me anonymously so why would I give them my information willingly by using their services?
I expect that as ad blockers become mainstream, the cross-site tracking iframe include style of ad will go the same way as pop-ups, and the advertising industry will have to look at new options again.
data already exists. apple is very late to the game and has a relatively tiny market share when compared all browser usage among all platform when including desktop.
The browser share graph shows Safari is second only to Chrome globally. The page has a new item saying 'Safari accounted for over half of US mobile and tablet usage in March', so I don't understand your "relatively tiny market share" point.
the point is SPECIFICALLY about 'desktop+tablet+mobile' market share. not among mobile alone, because ad revenue is not factored on mobile views only as well.
you need to select the all browser from the dropdown.
> apple is very late to the game and has a relatively tiny market share when compared all browser usage among all platform when including desktop
The GRAPH shows Safari second only to Chrome, with 12% vs 45% usage across all devices, globally.
How exactly is #2 browser worldwide "relatively tiny" ?
In addition, I commented that there is a NEWS item which says Safari has >50% of mobile/tablet usage. This was merely an interesting counterpoint to your "tiny market share" point, given that it's widely accepted that average people are using mobile devices to access the internet more than ever, and it's increasing.
the thread is still about ad revenue change post apple introduction of content blocking. to evaluate the impact you need to put the browser in context of the ad revenue pie, and that is about 10% (12% including desktop safari)
50% of a small pie is still small. it is growing, indeed, still of that ad revenue loss it is not game changing.
It's going to redouble the obnoxious tendency of sites to push users to their own apps where they can do essentially whatever they want. I doubt this was an unintended consequence.
Those that remain will eventually move to a model where ads come from the site itself, intermixed with content in such a way that makes blocking virtually impossible. This obviously presents trust issues for ad networks, but it really is the only workable solution.
without even spending a dime
Ads wouldn't work if people never spent a dime. This has been going on for quite some time, so the notion that it's built on nothing -- just a bunch of foolish advertisers giving money for nothing -- has always been folly.
I'm probably getting Blockr (http://blockr-app.com/ , .99€) just for the option to block the idiotic cookie warning overlays brought by the "cookie law". The rest of the options looks tempting too, specially social buttons blocker.
Ah! Thanks. It might be worthwhile to mention in the FAQ that not this does not run on all devices running iOS 9. The App Store description shows a list of supported devices, but because of the fragmentation of the iOS market :-), it is so long and incomprehensible that I don't bother to read it.
And no, I don't think "requires a 64-bit CPU" is sufficient to describe it.
I guess they are assuming that if you are installing a content blocker, you are tech savvy enough to know what CPU the device you own has. I agree this is a problem. This is a transition period. Most likely iOS 10 will be 64-bit only, so these kind of problems will get worse before disappearing altogether.
This is really annoying. I don't want to update my phone to iOS 9 until a jailbreak is out, and my old phone is an iPhone 4S so I can't try out ad blockers on it.
Not even the iPhone 5 is supported on all three (now 2 given Marco removing PEACE) ad-blockers. This is why even though I have an iPhone, I prefer my Android device. UPDATE: just found out about WeBlock. Works on iOS devices with iOS6+
Apparently, content blockers work on 32-bit CPUs, but Apple is restricting them on the store to 64-bit only. So you can go the BlockParty + EasyList route:
https://github.com/krishkumar/BlockParty
Another open-source iOS 9 content blocker here, using EasyList and EasyPrivacy: https://github.com/ArmandGrillet/Adios (I'm the guy behind this project).
As a data point, I just built/installed BlockParty on iPhone 5 and iPad Retina and see nothing but performance improvement. Many thanks again for the link!
Note: Apps containing content blocking extensions for Safari on iOS are available only on 64-bit devices, due to performance limitations of 32-bit devices.
According to the release notes for Safari 9 [1], it's because of performance concerns: "Apps containing content blocking extensions for Safari on iOS are available only on 64-bit devices, due to performance limitations of 32-bit devices"
I imagine there's no real reason that content blocking shouldn't work on 32-bit devices, but that Apple are trying to hit certain minimum performance numbers (for marketing/brand purposes)... and I'm sure they won't be upset if this should happen to encourage a few users of older devices to upgrade (i.e. forced obsolescence).
I think there are various examples of Apple doing this kind of thing (saying a certain generation of hardware is supported by software X, but then you find various things are disabled for you). Not exactly the same, but pre-2011 Macs cannot mirror their display via AirPlay (Apple saying the video hardware isn't up to the task) -- at least not until you install the third-party app AirParrot, then it works fine.
The 64-bit CPUs have a wider (and thus effectively faster) bus, and content blocking is probably rather strenuous on CPU cache (lots of string/pattern matching?). While the 64-bit cutoff is likely mostly a marketing artifact, content blocking on 32-bit CPUs could actually be 2x slower or worse than 64-bit CPUs and thus make page rendering times very painful for some sites.
Nope, it is pure marketing. There is no technical reason whatsoever for ad-blocking to require a 64 bit CPU or databus. It actually works fine on a single-core sub-Ghz ARM7 like that used in my phone (Motorola Defy) with all of 512MiB of memory.
Huh, did you really run iOS9 ad blocking on a Motorola Defy? I definitely believe Apple's position is 99% marketing, but I can imagine there are some common pages that load really slow on older hardware. I've seen older iPads crash consistently trying to render complicated pages.
Of course I did not run iOS on that Defy, why would I? Ad blocking was everywhere before apple finally decided to allow it on iOS. Inside those idevices are ARM-based CPUs, just like the ones in most other mobile hardware. What difference does it make whether the OS is based on Linux (Android), Mach/BSD (iOS) or even Windows (...Windows)? A regexp is a regexp after all...
The Defy does not crash rendering complex pages. It can get pretty slow though, reason for running extensions like NoScript for Android [1] (which runs just fine on the Fdroid.org Fennec build, ie. Firefox without the nasty bits) and uBlock origin.
Because apple knows ad-blocking is a much-desired feature, and as such can be used to 'convince' people it is time to ditch their 'older' devices (which, technically speaking, have no problems whatsoever in running ad-blocking software) and buy the latest&greatest.
For those doubting ad-blocking works on 32-bit ARM, have a look at the multitude of Android devices. Nearly all of them use a 32 bit CPU. Many of them run some form of ad-blocking software, ranging from proxy-based systems (a la privoxy) to browser plugins to host-based blocking. Often a combination of these are used, all on those 32 bit CPU's.
Intentional or not, allowing ad blocking on the mobile web should push content creators that rely on ad revenue to develop native applications. This seems like a double win for Apple.
This looks like its nice and simple, but does anyone know if there are any iOS9/El Capitan content blockers that support sync'd granular management of the actual block list?
Just wow. I have used Adblock on desktop before and didn't realize how much difference it does on mobile. On desktop it just removes clutter but on mobile it truly changes the whole browsing experience. This will be huge. Almost none of my non-techie friends use Adblock on desktop but everyone will be using an iOS blocker. This will hurt sites big time, and I feel sorry for sites that weren't using the big bad ad networks but still get blocked (whether that happens I'm not sure). The question is -- is it too late to go back and make advertising "right" now? Will sites that use non-intrusive and non-tracking ads be just as blocked as those who do, or does these blockers give no incentive to improve, only to circumvent?
Is your device rooted? If so, install AdAway (from the fdroid repo) or a similar host-based blocker. This takes care of a large part of the ad-related misery. I do run Firefox (well, Fennec, really, minus the obnoxious bits which Mozilla has been slipping in recently) on a 4 year old Motorola Defy. The battery lasts for about 5 days so I don't think that bit about FF 'drink[ing] battery' is correct, at least not in my case. I do not have uBlock (or any other blocker) installed as the hosts-based solution is sufficient for now.
Oh man, what a difference a year makes. I gave up on FF when it was a freshly laid turd. I tried it again a few months back on a recommendation from HN. Whoa. They've managed to polish it into a diamond.
You'd have to prize Firefox and uBlock (on my first gen Moto G) out of my cold dead hands.
I browsed The Verge site just fine. (The images took a little longer to load than I expected, but I checked and same happens on the desktop. So it's a shitty ISP/CDN/Optimization problem rather than a browser one.)
Firefox on Android is awful. Try to load any mildly heavy webpage (such as Verge) and scroll through it, you'll see how it struggles. (This on a Nexus 5.)
in terms of skill, the current ublock maintainer seems to be a kid with little to no skill who is not updating the project and instead milking it for money. I'm sure the iOS implementation is sound though.
You can compile and sideload an open source content blocker on a 32bit device. But performance on some sites is slower then without blocking because of the regex performance difference, it's almost 50% slower. I'd quote the statement from a dev on reddit, but can't remember where it was.
It should be true, but the reality is that most ad blockers have such a complex ruleset to match that they can actually go slower and use more RAM than not running them.
I'm not saying that Apple tried hard enough; the content blockers on iOS are JIT-compiled to native ARM 64-bit code, so maybe they didn't have the codepath ready for 32-bit and/or they didn't bother. But it's surely not just a technical excuse.
Can any one point to a rule set for this or other IOS blockers. Interested to take a look. Do they use much customization for mobile ads or are they just using the same lists as ABP?
I had to kill Safari and reload pages a few times before it started working. Once it did, though, the speed difference was the most obvious thing about it.
Received their 'Out Now' email yesterday, after signing up from the post here on HN regarding the app and its beta testing phase.
Don't have a problem with what I received, in fact it was something I was hoping to play with after installing the iOS9 GM, so was very happy to be notified very shortly after its release.
What I wasn't keen on however, was the use of emoji's in the subject. This instantly got deleted by myself due to their appearance at the beginning of the subject line. It was only a split second after I'd hit delete that I thought I caught a glimpse of 'Crystal' or at least a word of interest.
Is it just me or does it seem Apple is trying to put a hurt on Google and in turn hurt the web simultaneously. Safari has so many awful bugs that it's reminding me of the days of when you had to develop specifically for IE6.
Such tactics are reminiscent of when Microsoft ruled the land and well that didnt turn out so great for MS.
Apple is continuing it's now well-publicised push for enhanced/improved privacy for users of it's devices and services.
Apple don't provide any content blocking out of the box, they provide the ability for users to install a plugin/extension of their own choosing if they wish.
You don't have to use this to block google ads, or google analytics if you don't want to. But many people will, because the amount of data Google collects (or attempts to collect) every day is fucking scary to a lot of people.
