| I’ll do a change in Kiwi edition 116 to make it selectable in the UI (it’s almost a full rewrite of Kiwi and it will go out in about 10 days). Most likely to add a setting to make it optional. The main issue we had was with search partners, if we allow adblocking by default, then search engines still pay for the request, and this means… we pay. And by we, I mean “I” pay :) One solution that some competitors found is to integrate Adblock Plus (when you develop a browser they pay you for that) or AdGuard and let them do the whitelist (so in appearance the blame is on them, but I am fine to take the blame myself). Some browsers don’t allow external adblockers so they don’t have this issue at all; you can’t block their ads anyway (not 100% sure but I think Google, DuckDuckGo, Brave, etc are like this). Yandex who was the pioneer of Chromium extensions on mobile (before Kiwi) has similar mechanisms, except they fully block the extension, instead of whitelisting it on certain URLs. It’s currently possible to go around the whitelist, just by loading manually an extension. And yes it’s logic that Google Chrome doesn’t block Google search ads by default unless you load a workaround. The same that Kiwi doesn’t block Microsoft search ads when our main funding is Microsoft Bing, and to be fair, getting funded by search is the cleanest business model a browser can have. |
This is just because when people install a third party ad blocker, they are expecting a certain type of behaviour, and quietly changing expectations can have bad results for users who require specific functionality.
On an unrelated note, I would appreciate adding a toggle to disable the "Pull to refresh" gesture on Android. I find myself reloading accidentally during scrolling very often, which can result in data loss.