[corysama]

A nice trick with Focus on iOS is that you can set it to be the adblocker for mobile Safari. So, you install it, but don’t have to switch browsers to partially benefit from it.

There are apparently paid adblockers that route your web requests for all apps through a VPN. Personally, I’m not interested in any aspect of that last sentence. Filtering just Safari locally for free is good for me.

I’ve been against adblockers on the grounds that ads finance the content I want. But lately, ads and trackers have become so egregious on mobile that they, for practical purposes, prevent me from reading content at all. Either the content takes forever to load, or it jumps erratically around the screen for minutes or I’m put off from visiting a political or product related page because of the trackers.

With Focus, the web is usable again! Unfortunately, it’s not financially viable. I’m hopeful for the Brave browser for that. I’ll be trying it soon.

[yeukhon]

Incidentally I enabled this yesterday because I was grtting tired of “Congraulation! You won an Amazon gift card!”. I feel the loading speed has improved since. I am not sure how effective Focus will be against popups but let’s see...

1. Search “Safari” on the phone under “Settings”

2. Find “Content Blockers”

4. Choose “Focus”

If you don’t see “Focus” in the list, or if you want to configure “Focus”, open the “Focus” app, and click on the settings icon (top right corner).

Note if the site you are trying to read is broken (see 1 as an example, ironically), just open up Safari settings as instructed above, undo Focus, then reload the page. When you are done, just slide back on. This is unfortunate though.

1: https://blog.chromium.org/2017/01/open-sourcing-chrome-on-io...

[planb]

If you long-press the refresh button in mobile safari, you will get the option to reload the current page without content blockers.

[yeukhon]

Thank you! I am glad I know this trick now! I cited your comment in my other comment. This trick is so thoughtful from Apple - I have to mention this.

[eklavya]

So the content blockers can also submit my traffic details to some server? I was under the impression that they can only add to the rule list in Safari. I am suddenly very afraid of adguard. Can someone clarify on this?