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In part two of this series on the country of ad blockers, I take a look at a new product from a well-known visitor whose earlier product has been available for well-nigh a decade: Adblock Plus (ABP). Adblock Plus develops extensions for web browsers which tin can cake tracking, malware sites, and, of course, ads.

Concluding calendar week, ABP went beyond releasing extensions and launched a standalone Adblock Browser for Android and iOS that has congenital-in blocking capabilities. Before nosotros take a wait at the browser itself, it is worth noting ABP's interesting (and some call it controversial) business model. ABP signs contracts with companies that agree to its acceptable ads guidelines. Ads from these companies are allowed to pass through the ABP ad filter.

In a 2014 interview, ABP lead investor Tim Schumacher said that just the largest companies pay for these contracts. "Adblock Plus has been experimenting with different models," he said. "I tin't talk nearly specific contracts, but in some cases it was operation-based and in other cases it was more of a apartment fee. More that 90% of companies don't pay at all."

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The first affair you should know almost the free Adblock Browser is that, unsurprisingly, information technology works meliorate on recent devices with faster processors. For case, it ran slowly on an iPad two with a 32-scrap processor in my tests. So, slow, in fact, that at that place is non much speed advantage to using Safari with ads displayed. However, on a iPhone 6+ with a faster 64-flake processor, Adblock Browser rendered the mostly advertisement-less spider web pages fast enough to be interesting and useful. On the Android side, I tested it using a Nexus 4 and Nexus six.

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Here'south the use case that makes Adblock Browser interesting and useful for me: I generally use Google's own Chrome browser on Android devices and read web pages with ads. However, I often find interesting news items in my Google Now feed. And, some of the sources are either unfamiliar to me with possibly heavy handed ads or are from interesting sources with known heavy ads. So, I have links from Google Now handled by Adblock Browser.

A unmarried ad blocking filter is selected by default: ABP'south own EasyList. ABP describes information technology as: "The EasyList subscriptions are lists of filters designed for Adblock Plus that automatically remove unwanted content from the cyberspace, including annoying adverts, bothersome banners and troublesome tracking. The subscriptions are currently maintained by iv authors." You can use the Ad Blocking setting option to choose filters for other languages.

The "More blocking options" page lets you select options such as disabling tracking. Surprisingly, the option to disable malware domains is turned off by default.

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The "Adequate Ads" option is turned on by default. Equally I noted earlier, this allows ads to be displayed from companies who sign a paid or complimentary contract with ABP to concord to display not-intrusive ads.

Finally, in the Privacy settings window, you tin choose to turn off cookies and tracking (which are, by default, allowed). It also provides controls for remembering passwords (off past default), and clearing private information manually. There is also an pick to clear the cache upon a transmission exit using the Quit selection. Nevertheless, I didn't see a Quit choice in the Android app, and I didn't see this cache setting in the iOS app.

It is worth noting a few differences betwixt the iOS and Android versions of Adblock Browser. The iOS version lets y'all choose between DuckDuckGo (the default) and Google as its search engine. You can choose from a much larger list of search engines in the Android version. URL suggestions are turned off by default, but can be turned on. The Android version has a large number of brandish options, including enabling zoom on pages that unremarkably do non allow zooming on mobile devices. The Android version too has an option to save a web folio equally a PDF file (Settings -> Page -> Save as PDF).

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The recently released free Adblock Browser for iOS and Android makes it like shooting fish in a barrel for non-technical people to reduce the number of mobile web ads they encounter and protect themselves from known malware sites. Information technology is one more than tool that makes it easier for anyone to have an arguably improved mobile spider web feel.

If you missed part one in this series, bank check out: Ad blocking for the masses, part one: uBlock Origin. Finally, stay tuned for role three, where we will take a closer wait at Apple'due south Content Blocking Safari Extensions that will be fabricated available in the iOS 9 update released September 16.