Putting Mobile Ad Blockers to the Test
nytimes.com
Putting Mobile Ad Blockers to the Test
1–10 of 20 posts
Re: Putting Mobile Ad Blockers to the Test
#2It's a pity that all these articles comparing iOS ad blockers look only at the paid apps, some of which have some dubious backgrounds (like selling out to whitelist specific sites). A comparison with free ad blockers would do a whole lot of good instead.
Re: Putting Mobile Ad Blockers to the Test
#3Would be interested to find an ad blocker that is aware of my available bandwidth. If I'm using my phone/phablet on 3G/EDGE connection then block ads (especially on the kind of ad payload being reported in this article). But when I'm at home on fast Wifi connection then I'll take the additional bandwidth to display the ad as my part of the bargain on reading the content.
Re: Putting Mobile Ad Blockers to the Test
#4[deleted]
Re: Putting Mobile Ad Blockers to the Test
#5It's a pity that all these articles comparing iOS ad blockers look only at the paid apps, some of which have some dubious backgrounds (like selling out to whitelist specific sites). A comparison with free ad blockers would do a whole lot of good instead.
I suspect it's because there are too many to pay attention to in these short articles. There's 21 listed at http://www.loopinsight.com/2015/09/16/a-list-of-content-bloc... and it's probably not a complete list. Purity, Peace, Crystal and later 1Blocker were all day-one appearances, so they got the most coverage, including here on HN.
There's even a long list of open source ones -- and having just looked into this now, I'm thinking of switching to one of these:
https://github.com/krishkumar/BlockParty https://github.com/yene/CBlocker https://github.com/saagarjha/OpenAdblock (will work on iPhone 5 and 5C, it claims) https://github.com/dgraham/Ka-Block (for Safari on OS X) https://github.com/jlnr/SansFonts (kills web fonts on iOS)
Re: Putting Mobile Ad Blockers to the Test
#6Would be interested to find an ad blocker that is aware of my available bandwidth. If I'm using my phone/phablet on 3G/EDGE connection then block ads (especially on the kind of ad payload being reported in this article). But when I'm at home on fast Wifi connection then I'll take the additional bandwidth to display the ad as my part of the bargain on reading the content.
Sounds like a feature Apple should add in a future iOS release, especially if they redesign the Content Blockers section in Safari Preferences on iOS to allow extensions to put their settings in the Preferences menu directly. It's rather annoying right now to open an app, go to preferences, then open the app to change the preferences...
Re: Putting Mobile Ad Blockers to the Test
#7[deleted]
>Maybe they should go back to supporting print publications, such as the NYT?
Print publications are going out of business because consumers are abandoning them, not just because advertisers went to the web. Advertisers will just flock to wherever the eyes are.
Re: Putting Mobile Ad Blockers to the Test
#8Mobile does not mean Apple, which is what the entire article is about.
Re: Putting Mobile Ad Blockers to the Test
#9I'm not too sure about the methodology of their battery test - presumably if they loaded the web pages in an endless loop an ad blocker would just result in more page requests in the same timeframe (causing more data to be downloaded and more processing time to be used).
Re: Putting Mobile Ad Blockers to the Test
#10I'm not surprised they specifically call out boston.com
I've been reading that site weekly / daily for a few years now. On Desktop browsers its pretty painless (with an ad blocker on), but recently on my ipad the usability of the site has dropped to zero.
It constantly loads an ad that redirects me to the app store, while my browser sits on a blank page. If you hit the back button, boom forward to blank page, context switch to App store.
And the apps it wanted me to download were highly questionable in nature.
I'm amazed that a site of that high of brand recognition would stoop to that level (auto-redirect to crappy app store app). Will be finding a new site for my Boston news after that.