Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by erikb 3219 days ago
And you can't even install ad blockers on the phone.
6 comments

"And you can't even install ad blockers on the phone."

Nonsense. I've been using Firefox + uBlock Origin on Android for years. There are even browsers/add-ons that can disable JavaScript completely, but I find it too much of a hassle.

my mistake, can't edit my comment now. *iphone I mean
Crystal for iOS as one example. Safari provides support for adblockers in both mobile and desktop.
Firefox Mobile, uBlock Origin.

Adblockers are here.

Or Brave on Android; it's basically indistinguishable from Chrome (or whatever the Android standard browser currently is called).
Just tried this. Other than having to redo all my forums passwords again this browser looks to be a winner. On my phone firefox ran very slowly and hogged too many resources.
Try nightly - 57 feels like it has big performance gains on my ageing 1+
Or root and AdAway if you're looking to block them in other apps as well.
My iPhone has them just fine, and Android being less locked down makes me think it probably does too
It's possible it's more likely on Android.

However I don't think it's a given that it will be prompted by Google, or will continue to be the case.

Google is an advertising company. Android, does not make money through licensing. It makes money by being a vehicle for advertising. Apple on the other hand, make money through selling products. Advertising (on the web) shouldn't make much difference to them, and helps put pressure on the competing platform as well as Adblocking being a potentially valuable feature to help sell their products.

How? I can't install plugins into my Chrome on iPhone 6s.

And you can't switch the default browser so it only helps in 30 % of the cases (when you are not inside Facebook/Twitter/etc and when you are not clicking a link that opens the default browser)

But you can install Brendan Eich's ad-blocking Brave browser

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)

I'll try this one on all my phones. Thanks.
My browsing experience on a mobile phone stepped up greatly since I started using Firefox Focus. You don't even need to mess around with plugins because ad blocking is already a built-in core feature.
As others have said, now is actually a really rich time for ad/tracker-blocking browsers:

* Brave

* Firefox Focus

* Ghostery

to name but three.