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 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.
It's a race to the bottom, folks.
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.
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.
That is, for you to be profitable, you rely on someone else not doing something.
That is the nature of competition.
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.
* Block ads and trackers * Block social widgets * Block external fonts * Hide comments
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.
In an article about content blockers, http://www.imore.com/and-hour-safari-content-blockers-and-im... has 13 separate, third-party scripts/etc trying to load.
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.
edit: grammar
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...
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).
"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."
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/09/16/because-of-apple
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.
Reputable people may do that but my mail server is still getting 1000s of spams a day.
Here is our Open letter regarding this concern, and our solution: http://blog.adcontrolapp.com/post/128643445264/open-letter
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?
Why not? Even if they start serving their ads via google.com, you can still block them on by URL-matching, or same-origin filters...
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.
Btw, if someone's interested in the same cookie warning blocking using uBlock/ABP, here's a cool list: https://github.com/r4vi/block-the-eu-cookie-shit-list
iPad (first generation with retina screen, I think), running iOS 9. What gives?
And no, I don't think "requires a 64-bit CPU" is sufficient to describe it.
It's in App Store review and should be out shortly.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fi...
(I have already tried it)
I noticed a great difference on my 2011 Google Nexus 3 between adblock and uBlock Origin, in terms of memory usage.
The graphs that uBlock shows are very compelling: https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock
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.
on old devices new safari already struggle to keep in memory more than a couple tabs, so gut instinct points to memory being the issue.
edit: more specified to iOS.
I tried arstechnica.com and it's still showing ads. With Mercury (which always had its own ad blocker) there are no ads.
Is this now a thing, emoji's in email subjects?
Such tactics are reminiscent of when Microsoft ruled the land and well that didnt turn out so great for MS.
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.
- the majority of its revenue ain't ads, search, services, - they actually have a desktop platform.
Google is trying to make the web as a panacea for specially this reason. I remember reading this comment on Grubers site (http://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/09/15/ppk-stop-pushing...) and personally I agree with him and Koch.
