Ben Brooks: Mobile Safari Content Blocker Evaluations, September 2018

Ben Brooks:

I ran another round of content blocker testing for Mobile Safari in order to take a look at which ones are the “best” right now. To be fair: it’s really hard to find these content blockers on the App Store now, so I grabbed the ones which looked the most popular to me (top lists, and top search results) and then did the testing to see which was the best.

Now, I am using a particular word choice here: best. In the past I mostly evaluated on speed or website size reductions. This was problematic because a content blocker could work out to be very fast, while still breaking the usability of the site.

I love his subjective focus on “best”, and agree with his conclusions. Firefox Focus is an interesting option because it acts both as a system-wide Safari content blocker and as a standalone always-private web browser app. No special private or incognito mode — it’s always private, with no saved cookies, no history, etc.

I’d love to see someone do a survey of the field for Mac content blockers. (Brooks is all-in on iOS and doesn’t use a Mac any more.)

★ Wednesday, 26 September 2018