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Comment by oliyoung | Hacker News Reader

These guys (ie Verge) are going to have a really really tough time when iOS9 lands

https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/releaseno...

I have a hard time seeing the majority of iOS users installing one, this is the same as with most things, if it's not the default, 95% of users won't make use of it.

Is even the majority of users of desktop web browsers actually using adblockers yet?

Adblock Plus on Firefox shows a bit short of 20 million users, while Adblock on Chrome says 'over 200 million downloads', whatever that means in number of users. These numbers don't suggest a majority. (I don't think assuming over 500 million desktop users is crazy.)

Given that iOS is about 20% of total mobile users, this feature will probably make little to no difference, it might be a couple of % of those 20% of users, at the very best.

You're probably right against the parent, but in the long term I would expect use of ad blockers to rise, simply because ads are getting observably more bloated and intrusive.

Elementary example: the likes of us will get requests from our tech-illiterate friends and relatives - "my internet is broken. It's really slow." And we will install ABP/ublock whatever.

This is, of course, assuming that there are no dramatic 'interruptions' - eg, browsers ceasing to support ABP-type extensions, the ads-versus-adblockers arms race moving decisively in the former's favour; etc.

I can't find any numbers on adblocker usage over time during the recent period - would be a good thing to look at - but here's the google trend, FWIW. https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=ad%20blocker&cmpt=q&...

Thanks for the graph, that's quite interesting. Do you have any insight as to why it's risen so sharply during the past three years? I'm thinking maybe it's just connected to the increase in overall (especially smartphone) users of the internet? Even people who have been using desktops for years, use the internet more thanks to smartphones and thus ads become more pervasive in their life, thus perhaps prompting an increase as well?

Maybe you can share your thoughts on why you think it would be any indication that the overall percentage of internet users using ad blockers has gone up?

That certainly could be it - it's literally the only graph I could pull up at short notice. There are stats around but like browser usage etc they tend to come from this website or that. Based on some other numbers[0], trends seem to be more or less in line with what you'd expect: more blockers installed for visitors to tech-related sites; more installed on Firefox than IE, and Linux than Windows; etc. In that link, you're looking at nearly 10% of impressions blocked as of 3 years ago (which is obviously not the same thing as unique visitors, but I would be surprised if that was not higher than a few years before that).

I'm merely stating a hypothesis here, really - I have in mind how it was that people installed things like the google toolbar to block popups, and then browsers blocked popups by default, and then there were no more popups (OK, not quite, but still). The more irritating something is, the more likely a user will take steps to do something about it.

Time will tell.

[0] http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-percentage-of-Internet-user... - sorry for the hated Quora ink

They can just do what everybody else does, replace the site with "USE THE VERGE APP!!1!", and show the ads there instead. Which is a good reason for Apple to push adblocking in the browser.

This is Apple's goal. They want people to write apps and show ads through Apple's own ad network.

Hah, but they recently removed the Verge app from the android store to get people to use the mobile site instead.

This gives app makers the ability to throttle the ads show when using webViews? So FB, Twitter, etc. can render website content without ads? If so, this is a huge deal and needs to be a separate HN post.

This might not work in the webViews but will definitely work in the new Safari View Controller which will most probably become the default way for applications to display links.

Already discussed; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9775711

I've seen folks give Apple a lot of credit for this, but they're not building an ad blocker.

They're offering the APIs that can be used by developers to build ad blocking extensions. Not much different than what you can do in Chrome & Firefox already. Same held-at-arms-length thing.

You talk like Apple is doing something new and owns the market.

I haven't seen other mobile browsers support blocking 3rd party content yet. I think that's mainly because Google is the other major phone manufacturer, and their main source of income is that exact 3rd party content. Apple isn't burdened by that - they want to sell phones and keep them the best. Blocking 7 MB of JS that isn't the content the user wants is a good optimization.

You're right about Google, but FWIW Firefox on Android fully supports extensions - including eg uBlock origin.

Android supports it in many different forms. If you're rooted you can block pretty much every ad in all apps, but even without root Firefox on Android supports adblocking extensions and there are alternative browsers focused on ad blocking and privacy.

Also to be fair you can already block ads on iOS if you jailbreak your phone.

No jailbreak needed.

https://www.weblockapp.com/

Ghostery has its own mobile browser on Android, blocking ads and trackers.

iOS also has a Ghostery app, but it has a less than optimal user experience. The UI is confusing. They bury essential options in the share icon, options that have nothing to do with sharing.

I'm not sure if the Android version is as bad as the iOS version.

Not necessarily. But ultimately right now the level of mobile ad blocking is very low. This will make a real difference to that - regardless as to whether it's new or innovative.

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