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Crystal – iOS 9 ad blocker

crystalapp.co

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Re: Crystal – iOS 9 ad blocker

#91

Post by zimpenfish »

belorn wrote: post #87
bbayer wrote: post #40

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 th…

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 unsubscri…

> 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.

Re: Crystal – iOS 9 ad blocker

#92

Post by stephenr »

bbayer wrote: post #56
stephenr wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. In an article about content blockers, http://www.imore…

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

> 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.

Re: Crystal – iOS 9 ad blocker

#93

Post by Yetanfou »

fredsir wrote: post #51
lstamour wrote: post #13

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 remov…

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 b…

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.

Re: Crystal – iOS 9 ad blocker

#94

Post by tomp »

qubex wrote: post #75
stephenr wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. In an article about content blockers, http://www.imore…

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.

Re: Crystal – iOS 9 ad blocker

#95

Post by nailer »

lstamour wrote: post #24
lstamour wrote: post #13

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 remov…

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…

I don't mind most ads, but I'd happily pay just to block EU cookie warnings (with a good UX).

Re: Crystal – iOS 9 ad blocker

#96

Post by Flow »

Frqy3 wrote: post #50
stephenr wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. In an article about content blockers, http://www.imore…

Also, lagging page loading to allow the auctioning of ad space a bit longer to run to hopefully extract a slightly higher price.

There's an auction happening for each client request?

Re: Crystal – iOS 9 ad blocker

#97

Post by frou_dh »

vbezhenar wrote: post #88
Drakim wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Is there some compilation of free software links?

It costs money to join the Apple Developer Program so it's probably in peoples' minds to at least recoup that.

Re: Crystal – iOS 9 ad blocker

#98

Post by tomp »

otabdeveloper1 wrote: post #66
bbayer wrote: post #40

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 th…

> I am curious how this will impact the web. 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!)

> You can't adblock the Google.

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...

Re: Crystal – iOS 9 ad blocker

#99

Post by interpol_p »

chris-at wrote: post #48

Does it actually work? (yes I enabled it in settings) I tried arstechnica.com and it's still showing ads. With Mercury (which always had its own ad blocker) there are no ads.

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.

Re: Crystal – iOS 9 ad blocker

#100

Post by stephenr »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #85
rimantas wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to provide your figures?

https://pagefair.com/press_release/pagefair-2015-report/ literally first link on google also, browser share: http://gs.statcounter.com/#all-browser-ww-monthly-201408-201...

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.
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