Crystal – iOS 9 ad blocker
crystalapp.co
crystalapp.co
Except when I ran Purify with Scripts disabled on Slate, then the page loaded instantly with no ad for obvious reasons. (Sadly Purify is missing an extension to selectively enable JS.)
Searching the store, Blockr looks nice enough, specifically calling out blocking of Cookie Warnings, but other than that, seems like a more configurable Crystal with features of Peace.
1Blocker which I have yet to use, currently takes the cake on configurability -- perhaps too much so -- it lets you turn on and off individual rules as well as add your own by typing in the filter directly.
You can Enable/Disable each one, so you may enable all at the same time
It'll be down to config UI and the quality of their rules - the rules are all going to be derived from publicly available rule lists. There will very likely be publicly available lists in Apple's format quite soon as well.
Marco Ament comes out looking best on the last point by being completely upfront about where the rules in his blocker come from.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10192391
It's not going to be any faster or slower than any other blocker using a similar number of conditions.
Sorry, but no.
Those publishers have the option of asking their readers to pay for the content directly, which is exactly what the developer does.
They also have the option to use ad networks that aren't completely user-hostile.
I don't know how much work has gone into making these content blocker apps, but I bet it has taken some time - time that in any "normal" business would be charged for, and I think mobile apps creators should charge more for their apps too. In my experience, there are two types of mobile apps consumers. Those that won't pay for an app, whether it costs $1, $10 or $20, and those that will, and I think it would be healthier for the ecosystem to cater at least as much to the latter group as the former, but I don't think that's currently the case.
It's a race to the bottom, folks.
Is there some compilation of free software links?
A big thank you to all 1200 of the testers who have helped shape Crystal into a solid application. I'm sorry to everyone else who didn't get a spot to test it, but the good news is, you can try it now for free!
Why Free? I want everyone to experience Crystal for themselves so as a thank you to my early adopters, I've decided to make it free for a very limited time.
Whats the catch? No catch, but I would like to request you help me out with Rating, Sharing, a quick survey or donating a little money below, I do have a wife & 2 kids to feed
Perhaps there's a race to the bottom in mobile apps but it probably produces more useful things than the race to tut-tut the decisions or generosity of others.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10231933
so you won't have to wait terribly long. And there are already a few that have IAP but basic functionality is free.
I would have thought nowadays with Family Sharing accounts, kids accounts were less likely to need gift cards.
Money is only one of the motivators for writing software. It might be the prime motivator in the apple world (producers and consumers alike) but it by no means the only one.
That is, for you to be profitable, you rely on someone else not doing something.
That is the nature of competition.
* Block ads and trackers * Block social widgets * Block external fonts * Hide comments
The number of things that everyday sites embed in their pages is phenomenal. The Ghostery extension gives a good idea about how much crap gets loaded.
In an article about content blockers, http://www.imore.com/and-hour-safari-content-blockers-and-im... has 13 separate, third-party scripts/etc trying to load.
6 tagged as 'analytics', 4 tagged as 'advertising', 3 tagged as 'social widgets'
That is a ridiculous amount of extra requests, extra data, and of course, tracking.
The advertising (and since the obsession with 'cloud' or 'SAAS', analytics too) industry has been fucking end-users for YEARS. Now users have a credible way to fight back, and suddenly it's "not fair?".
If you want advertising to fund your site/blog/whatever, use an ad network that doesn't try to digitally fuck me every time I visit your site.
edit: grammar
Publishers should ask themselves whether they are in the business of providing quality content to consumers, or in the business of sharing revenue with advertisers. Deciding which side of this line they fall on will help them make the right choices.
Site operators choose the ad networks they use, so yes, it is fair to 'punish' people for choosing to affiliate themselves with bad-actors.
> than another solution shall be proposed
Non-invasive analytics (i.e. a single company logging who visits its own site(s) using Piwik or OWA) are generally not blocked, and non-tracking ad networks needn't necessarily be blocked on privacy grounds.
As for your little quip about WSJ links. Do you mean this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10015496 ?
> I can't read the article because its paywalled
I never asked for a "workaround". Honestly the only reason I wanted to see the article is to identify if the article is as ridiculous as the title implied, so why would I buy a subscription for a publisher that puts out shit like that?
1) Relevance. Take your cooking website example, say if that recipes has chicken in it. Then the magazine method can show you an ad about local supermarket for you to buy chicken. Then how do they know if you "probably" prefer walmart or wholefoods or local farmer's market? What if you are an organic guy? (which means you probably prefer wholefoods) Traditional magazine method doesn't make the result relevant enough for today's online advertising standard.
2) Feedback. As a brand who wanna do an online campaign, how do I know if my advertisement works? Today's advertiser no longer count on clicks, they count on impression. They don't need you to click to ad. They just want to make sure you see it. How do they if you didn't block to ad? How do they know if you didn't go to other tabs when their 15 second youtube ad is playing? That means at least 1 additional request send out from your browser. Usually it's more because they wanna know if you watched half of the video or the whole video. Things above don't have to be done with tracking you profile, but the other things does. For example, how to the advertisers know if they reach their target audience? If I'm selling the new mustang how do I know if I show the ad to ford people instead of chevy people? It's called on target percentage and it's one of the top metrics advertisers care about.
3) Availability. In many situations, there's just no ad available that actually relevant to the content. Then it's better for advertisers to show you something that may relevant to you instead of something completely random or no ad at all.
Your magazine method has works for decades doesn't mean it will continue to work in the future. Does magazine itself still work?
BTW, when I raise the WSJ thing I didn't target you specifically and I have no idea you had that comment you posted before. But as you said, you (and probably most people) won't pay for subscription for such ridiculous publication. Then advertisement is the way for you to read it freely so you can identify if the article is ridiculous or not. Or maybe just don't read it and comment by title?
A site can just as easily say "show me ads for <page specific tags> as hard-coded "recipes", and knowing where I shop just goes into the creepy factor even more.
But forget all that - your suggestion, to avoid a tracking cookie from the various companies in what is frankly an industry with a terrible track record for doing the right thing, is to use the NAI "don't track me" "feature"... Which requires that I accept cookies from any domain and let them put a cookie on my device?
Are you aware of how stupid I would have to be, to believe that works?
I find it really hard to communicate with you because before we even start this discussion you seems already tagged the entire ad industry as an "evil empire" who try to steal your personal information all the time. The ad industry is not an angle for sure. It's just a business that try to make money, like any other business. Intentionally ruin people's life is not the interest of any mature business. Believe or not, doing things that make people hate ads is the last thing the ad industry wants. Because the more everyone hate ads, the less effective those ad campaigns will be, and the less ad companies get paid. Most of the problems with ads today are not introduced in favor of anybody, it's just not as easy as you might think to find a overall better way. Do you recall how many years it has been for people to actually produce a practical substitution for gas engine since everyone realize it's messing up our planet?
In the end, I'm interest to hear your vision on how to fund high quality online contents today without the profit of targeted advertisement.
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, its a fucking duck. The Ad industry doesn't try to steal peoples information all the time, they successfully create very detailed profiles on people. You yourself admitted this when claiming that "only targeted advertising is effective".
> So I'm pretty sure that opt-out feature works.
...for the ad networks who are members of NAI and who abide by its guidelines... by requiring a cookie on every device I use, and requiring that every device is set to allow third-party cookies, which further increases the chances for me to be tracked online.
Ad this point, I don't need to demonstrate the shady practices of the ad industry - they do that well enough by themselves.
I don't care if you work for an ad company, and frankly I don't care if the adoption of content blocking software causes your employer to go out of business and you to lose your job. You chose to work for that company, knowing full-well what they do.
The ad industry made choices about how it would operate its business, and is now paying the consequences. Same goes for you, as an individual.
If ads make money based on click-throughs and purchases, then my blocking them has zero change in revenue generated. If they are simply displaying for brand awareness (less common on the web) then sure I'm having a minor impact but given that ads often ruin content enough to close the window (recent example being a floating banner covering half my screen and thus making article unreadable) I doubt there is positive brand impact anyway.
I don't want "targeted" "relevant" ads related to what I wrote on Facebook yesterday or what I googled last Tuesday. Ever. I'll just have to live with whatever content people can afford to show me without such ads. I really don't feel sorry for any ad network or any site that used them.
Yet, such genuine targeting (not blindly matching keywords) seems to've attracted little attention from the ad industry - instead, all we get is more AdWords (unintrusive, just fairly useless, and occasionally amusingly inappropriate) and the likes of Outbrain (responsible for the "From Around the Web" ads).
If the site has too many ads for your taste, simply don't visit that site. You have some sense that you are entitled to whatever efforts the site owner has committed to bring you content (obviously enough effort to be interesting to you) without supporting them through the ad service they chose. If you don't like their ads, you could simply move on, but now you're taking the fruits of their labor without giving them the passive support they ask in return.
I'm not saying its right or wrong, but the attitude of "they did what I don't like, so im going to do x" is very much entitled...
I bet they'd all love that - no visitors because of their shitty ad network choices, thus no costs right. They can eat their own failed dreams for dinner.
Is this the ad-blocking equivalent of "if you don't like the laws here, go to a different country" ??
In that analogy ad blocking is giving the guy trying to attach the tracking device a punch in the nose and stopping him.
As I've said, ads don't have to be so invasive and intrusive. If they acted responsibly we wouldn't be so adamant about blocking them.
It's not an issue of morality. It's an issue of overstepping what's acceptable to someone clicking on a link, exactly the same as what happened to pop-ups and pop-unders.
Look at the two dev tools charts here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9605/the-ios-9-review/10#Safar...
That is crazy. I'm sorry, but if your business model depends on megabytes of JS and 20 seconds per-page of network activity on my mobile device, I'm going to block it if I can. And if your business model fails, that's not my problem.
It's not even the advertisements that are the issue. If everyone started just serving images and removed all of the JS coming down from these ad exchanges I would turn my ad blocker off.
(As an aside, it's a hilarious juxtaposition listening to the arguments about the taxi industry and why Uber killing them is for the best, at the same time as I'm hearing the arguments about how a random publisher should be able to decide how much code I'm going to allow to execute on my own personal device and me blocking it is immoral or entitled.)
"The coming reckoning for publishers is not “because of Apple”. It’s because of the choices the publishers themselves made, years ago, to allow themselves to become dependent on user-hostile ad networks that slow down the web, waste precious device battery life, and invade our privacy. Apple has simply enabled us, the users who are fed up with this crap, to do something about it. If aggressive content blocking were enabled out of the box, by default, I could see saying the result is “because of Apple”. But it’s not. What’s about to happen is thus because of us, the users."
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/09/16/because-of-apple
It will make Google (the only ad company that actually outright steals personal data instead of acting nice and building Bayesian models) into a monopoly. You can't adblock the Google.
(Obviously I'm exaggerating for emotional impact, but the basic gist is true. This is not a good development for privacy on the Internet!)
Why not? I generally don't use Google services (certainly not their search), and (currently) Ghostery extension for Safari. I don't remember the last time I saw an ad, from any network, but certainly not Google.
Your earlier comment "you can't block .google.com" also doesn't really mean much, because ads on third-party sites are served from adclick.net and google-syndication.com - not from google.com.
Even if they changed that practice, and started using google.com to serve their ads - I'd happily block it. I don't want them to track me anonymously so why would I give them my information willingly by using their services?
Why not? Even if they start serving their ads via google.com, you can still block them on by URL-matching, or same-origin filters...
also, browser share: http://gs.statcounter.com/#all-browser-ww-monthly-201408-201...
the point is SPECIFICALLY about 'desktop+tablet+mobile' market share. not among mobile alone, because ad revenue is not factored on mobile views only as well.
you need to select the all browser from the dropdown.
You claimed:
> apple is very late to the game and has a relatively tiny market share when compared all browser usage among all platform when including desktop
The GRAPH shows Safari second only to Chrome, with 12% vs 45% usage across all devices, globally.
How exactly is #2 browser worldwide "relatively tiny" ?
In addition, I commented that there is a NEWS item which says Safari has >50% of mobile/tablet usage. This was merely an interesting counterpoint to your "tiny market share" point, given that it's widely accepted that average people are using mobile devices to access the internet more than ever, and it's increasing.
50% of a small pie is still small. it is growing, indeed, still of that ad revenue loss it is not game changing.
Here is our Open letter regarding this concern, and our solution: http://blog.adcontrolapp.com/post/128643445264/open-letter
For example, mail news letter used to be sent out in mass to any email that the company has harvested. That tactic is now illegal, so they only send out to customers who has subscribed to it and the letter must have instructions on how to unsubscripted.
However, your friend do not actually support people if they don't also click on the ads and buy the products. Money don't get magically created, and people need to buy products before any content creator can get get compensated for supplying advertisement.
Reputable people may do that but my mail server is still getting 1000s of spams a day.
Those that remain will eventually move to a model where ads come from the site itself, intermixed with content in such a way that makes blocking virtually impossible. This obviously presents trust issues for ad networks, but it really is the only workable solution.
without even spending a dime
Ads wouldn't work if people never spent a dime. This has been going on for quite some time, so the notion that it's built on nothing -- just a bunch of foolish advertisers giving money for nothing -- has always been folly.
Btw, if someone's interested in the same cookie warning blocking using uBlock/ABP, here's a cool list: https://github.com/r4vi/block-the-eu-cookie-shit-list
iPad (first generation with retina screen, I think), running iOS 9. What gives?
Apparently, content blockers work on 32-bit CPUs, but Apple is restricting them on the store to 64-bit only. So you can go the BlockParty + EasyList route: https://github.com/krishkumar/BlockParty
It works very well.
Note: Apps containing content blocking extensions for Safari on iOS are available only on 64-bit devices, due to performance limitations of 32-bit devices.
https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/releaseno...
I imagine there's no real reason that content blocking shouldn't work on 32-bit devices, but that Apple are trying to hit certain minimum performance numbers (for marketing/brand purposes)... and I'm sure they won't be upset if this should happen to encourage a few users of older devices to upgrade (i.e. forced obsolescence).
I think there are various examples of Apple doing this kind of thing (saying a certain generation of hardware is supported by software X, but then you find various things are disabled for you). Not exactly the same, but pre-2011 Macs cannot mirror their display via AirPlay (Apple saying the video hardware isn't up to the task) -- at least not until you install the third-party app AirParrot, then it works fine.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/releaseno...
The Defy does not crash rendering complex pages. It can get pretty slow though, reason for running extensions like NoScript for Android [1] (which runs just fine on the Fdroid.org Fennec build, ie. Firefox without the nasty bits) and uBlock origin.
For those doubting ad-blocking works on 32-bit ARM, have a look at the multitude of Android devices. Nearly all of them use a 32 bit CPU. Many of them run some form of ad-blocking software, ranging from proxy-based systems (a la privoxy) to browser plugins to host-based blocking. Often a combination of these are used, all on those 32 bit CPU's.
And no, I don't think "requires a 64-bit CPU" is sufficient to describe it.
It's in App Store review and should be out shortly.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fi...
(I have already tried it)
I had terrible battery problems on a moto g2 about a year ago which is what I'm basing my opinion on so that may be invalid now.
You'd have to prize Firefox and uBlock (on my first gen Moto G) out of my cold dead hands.
I browsed The Verge site just fine. (The images took a little longer to load than I expected, but I checked and same happens on the desktop. So it's a shitty ISP/CDN/Optimization problem rather than a browser one.)
[1] http://blog.lmorchard.com/2015/07/22/the-verge-web-sucks/
That said, it can be browsed well on Chrome, so it should work on Fx as well.
I noticed a great difference on my 2011 Google Nexus 3 between adblock and uBlock Origin, in terms of memory usage.
on old devices new safari already struggle to keep in memory more than a couple tabs, so gut instinct points to memory being the issue.
the 32-bit hang up is because of performance of compiling the rules, not executing them.
The graphs that uBlock shows are very compelling: https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock
I'm not saying that Apple tried hard enough; the content blockers on iOS are JIT-compiled to native ARM 64-bit code, so maybe they didn't have the codepath ready for 32-bit and/or they didn't bother. But it's surely not just a technical excuse.
edit: more specified to iOS.
I tried arstechnica.com and it's still showing ads. With Mercury (which always had its own ad blocker) there are no ads.
Is this now a thing, emoji's in email subjects?
Such tactics are reminiscent of when Microsoft ruled the land and well that didnt turn out so great for MS.
Apple don't provide any content blocking out of the box, they provide the ability for users to install a plugin/extension of their own choosing if they wish.
You don't have to use this to block google ads, or google analytics if you don't want to. But many people will, because the amount of data Google collects (or attempts to collect) every day is fucking scary to a lot of people.
- the majority of its revenue ain't ads, search, services, - they actually have a desktop platform.
Google is trying to make the web as a panacea for specially this reason. I remember reading this comment on Grubers site (http://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/09/15/ppk-stop-pushing...) and personally I agree with him and Koch.