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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

This is a fantastic development for users. That being said, hopefully you can permit me being a grouch:

Apple hasn't done this entirely out of the goodness of their own hearts. After all, this isn't going to filter ads in native apps, is it? If you're a site that relies on ad revenue you've just been given another reason to live in app-land, not web-land.

Imagine you're a publisher. With one OS release Apple has provided the ability to block ads on the web and Apple News, a charming new platform for you to publish your articles, complete with iAd integration. Which one are you going to prioritise?

Not that this is an either-or thing: just like Google vacuums up your personal data and gives you Google Now in return, Apple will push publishers towards iOS apps while also giving you a great web experience.

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As a longtime iOS user browsing the web keeps getting worse.

These are getting bigger, they're more resource intensive thanks to 'waterfall' design. They push up my data usage.

They spam open the App Store, and are all around broken. Recently I can't watch videos on some sites because ads elsewhere on the page grab the click and pop a new tab open.

They take longer to load than the real content. Then they MOVE the real content AFTER I STARTED READING because it took them that long to load.

I've used a Flash blocked on my laptop for years, but I didn't used to care about blocking on iOS because it wasn't a problem.

That has ABSOLUTELY changed in the last year or two. Reader mode used to fix sites but as they do more stupid JS trickery that often doesn't work.

I keep running across articles I literally CAN NOT read on my phone due to these kinds of issues.

Ignore iAds and Goigle and privacy (all good points). This is starting to seriously degrade my iOS experience and I'm not surprised Apple was moved to do it.

You can block ads on iOS right now (but it's not easy): install 'privoxy' on a home computer and set up your iPad to use it as a proxy server.

Use Atomic Web or Mercury as your browser. Both will block ads. I've used AW for about 3 years on both my iPhone and iPads. I couldn't live without it.

Apple hasn't done this entirely out of the goodness of their own hearts.

Of course not. Read the article (or spend a few moments considering the consumer tech coprorate landscape), and it's obvoiusly also an assault on Google.

"An Apple realist might argue that its great rival Google makes more than 90 percent of its revenue from online advertising — a growing share of that on mobile, and a large share of that on iPhone. Indeed, Google alone makes about half of all global mobile advertising revenue. So anything that cuts back on mobile advertising revenue is primarily hurting its rival."

The thought that it's part of a long-game play positioning Apple within the content space also comes to mind.

Except that it's not an assault on all mobile ads, no matter what the article says - it's an attack on as platforms that compete with their own iAd mobile advertising service. If I remember correctly, it's also now the only one allowed to use GPS data to target ads on iOS. This is all just an attack on Google to position Apple as the one selling or their users for a cut of the ad revenue.

Anything that stops the obnoxious redirects to the App Store would be awesome. I started turning off JS on mobile today simply because most news sites I read had become unusable. This is great news and an ideal way to punish publishers that bombard my experience with giant turds. I will gladly pay for content that doesn't suck.

Anything that stops the obnoxious redirects to the App Store would be awesome.

Except that you're going to get a lot more of them, pointing you towards native apps that serve you articles with unblockable ads.

Or you stop going to those sites. Though I don't browse on my phone so I don't have this problem.

This is the real answer to everything: if users dont like the ads, then dont go to the site.

Or, you know, they block them. Deal with it.

I really do wish that safari had a quick toggle for JS. Browsing the web on iOS is so much faster and less annoying with JS disabled, but I don't like digging through system settings to toggle it.

Apple is a for-profit corporation. Its purpose is to make money and it's very good at it.

That said, let me off a non-cynical motivation: remaining competitive. Many users want to block ads, and blocking most web ads on Android is fairly easy even without root. Firefox users can just install an extension. Chrome users need to configure the local-proxy based version of ABP. It's a minor hassle, but my mother uses it, so anyone moderately tech-savvy can too.

> It's a minor hassle.

It's a major hassle because it doesn't work properly or in the case of Firefox mobile - is a major POS. Chrome with ABP via proxy has some serious issues that make the browser not able to load certain pages at all until it's restarted.

Basically, I tried ABP/Android a few times and it sucked. Maybe things worked for you on your version of Android on the phones you've owned, but the fact that it sporadically doesn't work for people like me and my wife is proof enough that it's no silver bullet.

That's why I do all of my mobile web browsing on a Windows tablet. I get a full OS and full control. Fuck the new world order! They can keep their trojan horse, locked down, shitty mobile operating systems.

µBlock on Firefox/Android is nice, much like the desktop version.

I only used ABP-by-proxy briefly before I rooted my phone, but my mother reports mostly good results and only minor hiccups. I currently use Adaway, a hosts-file based solution that requires root. I know some builds of Android on some devices resist rooting, but it's officially supported on my Nexus 5.

Jailbreak and block hosts that serve ads. Your iOS experience will be virtually ad free, with the added bonus of giving you control over your device.

"Apple hasn't done this entirely out of the goodness of their own hearts. After all, this isn't going to filter ads in native apps, is it? If you're a site that relies on ad revenue you've just been given another reason to live in app-land, not web-land." It's a very nice way to capture Apple's share of revenue generated by ios users clicking on ads in the browser.

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