Re:The Rise of Adblock Shaming
by SOLAR_FIELDS on Sunday July 15, 2018 @06:11AM
(#17534594)
Interesting. Two questions:
Why are iOS adblockers for Safari so rare? The major ones (uBlock and ABP) don’t support Safari.
Why do I have to enable notifications to use the app? The explanation given by the welcome screen doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Edit: it looks like ABP does in fact support iOS safari now
Safari/iOS adblockers need to use a specific Safari content blocking format which is different from the classic ABP format. Presumably the extra work to support this format (and the content blocking extension API) discourages some vendors.
Notifications are required as it is the only way to notify the app, and users, when we release updates to our ad blocking rules. Otherwise we would need to release an app update every time a blocking rule needs to change. We update the ad blocking rules generally weekly.
> Auto-playing videos and animations which are excessive
I wonder if I'm in the minority, but I really hate any auto-playing video.
- Slowness in web page loading, rendering and UI responsiveness due to excessive ad embeds and excessive usage of Javascript
- Losing their privacy by being tracked by ad networks and analytics code; especially across sites and across devices
- Auto-playing videos and animations which are excessive and distract from the actual content
It's likely that if the adtech industry had self-regulated earlier and shown some restraint then adblockers would never have become popular.
For those interested, our adblock product is available for iOS and macOS from https://www.magiclasso.co/