The iOS 9 Content Blocker thread

[ardchoille50]

I'm running Blockr, Purify, and Safari Blocker. I like Safari Blocker best as it lets you add customized rules (by URL, regex, etc).

 

[Mactaculious]

I installed an app that lets me view the source of a website on an iOS device using the share sheets. Although it may be easier on the desktop by using the web inspector. You find the class (.) or id (#) of the html elements you want to hide and put it into 1Blocker with commas between each item.

As for the benefit, at least in the blockers I've tried they often leave "holes" in the page where ads should be after they are removed. Furthermore 9to5 has a lot of inline promo content from their sister sites that I don't care much to see. They also have a stock price bar and social sharing icons that I wanted to remove. So I grabbed all of the names of those html elements and put them on the block list. So ad containers collapse. I've been doing this for sites I frequent that I want to also block ads on. It makes for a cleaner browsing experience.

Can you block HTML elements like tables and rows? I have some empty blocks in a side bar that I want to block but they are not listed with having a .class or #id or the above parent they are nested under either.

 

[hank moody]

I'm running Blockr, Purify, and Safari Blocker. I like Safari Blocker best as it lets you add customized rules (by URL, regex, etc).

and it has crowdsourced rules.

but my favorite is adblock fast.

 

[KALLT]

and it has crowdsourced rules.

but my favorite is adblock fast.

It does seem to do a good job for now.

 

[msephton]

Can you block HTML elements like tables and rows? I have some empty blocks in a side bar that I want to block but they are not listed as a CSS .class or #id.

Learn about CSS selectors and specificity.

 

[blackboxxx]

Several reasons. One, they have actual employees that need to be paid. Two, those employees are there to make sure that the contracts are concluded and complied with. The advertising sector is huge. Three, they are sometimes subject of lawsuits that cost money. Four, they are letting mostly big advertisers pay for their expenses so that users don’t have to. Why not let the polluter pay for the pollution they caused? Makes perfect sense to me. That’s something different than taking bribes. A bribe presupposes an inducement for something that the bribee isn’t inclined to do. That’s not what is happening here.

That's why Crystal's decision seems ethically dubious. ABP is free for end users; if they don't like Eyeo's business model, they can switch to AdBlock Edge (ABP fork without acceptable ads whitelist), uBlock or any other free alternative.
But Crystal is a paid app, and charging both users and advertisers seems like an attempt to eat a cake and have it too.

 

[jamesdunn72]

safari blocker and adblock fast are both excellent and best of all free. Guys, dont spend your money on paid adblockers, try the free ones, they work just as well, or even better! Thank me later.

 

[Apple_Robert]

Review for Adblock (by Betafish) has been posted.

 

[KALLT]

That's why Crystal's decision seems ethically dubious. ABP is free for end users; if they don't like Eyeo's business model, they can switch to AdBlock Edge (ABP fork without acceptable ads whitelist), uBlock or any other free alternative.
But Crystal is a paid app, and charging both users and advertisers seems like an attempt to eat a cake and have it too.

Why is it ethically dubious? It isn’t going to affect the blocking mechanism of the app or the block list, it is purely an optional whitelist. Customers can continue to enjoy the app and he already confirmed that more features will be added in addition to this. As long as there is a clear separation between the block list and Eyeo’s whitelist, I don’t see a problem with this.

I think the ethical concerns have more to do with the fact that someone is profiting from this dubious business model that can have a big impact on the business model of so many other sectors (an inherent ‘wrongdoing’). At least with independent developers like Murphy people find comfort in the narrative that it’s just a tip and that he needs to cover the costs for hosting the block list as well as responding to customers. Yet, many people seem perfectly fine paying €4 for Purify. Is that not unethical? Is it alright if these apps were offered for free and only Eyeo would profit from it? I read that Peace made more than $100,000 in less than 48 hours.

 

[scjr]

http://www.wsj.com/articles/propelled-by-apple-ad-blocking-cottage-industry-emerges-1443115929

Still, the U.K.-based software developer was surprised by how fast consumers snapped up his product. In the week following its Sept. 16 launch, the 99-cent app was downloaded more than 100,000 times, according to data from mobile-app market intelligence firm Apptopia, generating an estimated $75,000 for Mr. Murphy. (Apple gets a cut.)

With over 35,000 downloads and a $3.99 price tag, an iOS blocker called Purify has generated over $150,000 in revenue since its launch Sept. 16, Apptopia said.

 

[hank moody]

This one is pretty cool from a technical perspective. They claim to use only 7 filtering rules. But the rules are huge; good luck reading them:

https://github.com/rocketshipapps/adblockfast/blob/master/opera/chrome/scripts/blocking.js

No doubt machine-compiled. The JSON list they appear to generate for the iOS version is significantly larger.

Unfortunately it doesn't currently have a whitelist feature.

What do you think? Is it good? Better than the others?

The fact that it only have 7 rules is a real advantage? Or just marketing?

 

[Apple_Robert]

I see Adblock Fast blocks sponsored ads on my iPhone 6, as well as my iPad Air. Nice.

 

[Rigby]

What do you think? Is it good? Better than the others?

The fact that it only have 7 rules is a real advantage? Or just marketing?

Not sure yet. I'm impressed by the engineering though. Essentially they somehow derived a small number of big regular expressions that are equivalent to a long list of simple matching rules (which were apparently taken from existing filter lists). If regular expressions have certain properties, they can be executed very efficiently using a special algorithm (Thompson's construction algorithm). I guess it is possible that it could be faster than running through a traditional long pattern list. What puzzles me is that the iOS version seems to use a conventional long JSON blocklist rather than the "7 rules". So I'm not sure if the above is true for this version as well, or how it would work together with Safari's rule compiler (which probably uses a similar algorithm itself).

 

[scjr]

I see Adblock Fast blocks sponsored ads on my iPhone 6, as well as my iPad Air. Nice.

I'm using it now and it seems to be doing a pretty good job, for being so simple!

 

[macduke]

Can you block HTML elements like tables and rows? I have some empty blocks in a side bar that I want to block but they are not listed with having a .class or #id or the above parent they are nested under either.

Yeah, like the guy below said you need to learn about selectors. This whole discussion could quickly become an introductory course to HTML and CSS, lol. Long story short you don't put periods or hashes in front of elements that don't have any classes or ids. Just use table, tr, td, etc. If you want to target only tables inside another element, then you would do, for instance: .ad-container table. You can mix selectors too. Think of everything as being nested inside everything else. You can also get more specific. For instance a container in the header with a certain table that needs cells styled could be referenced as such: body header nav.mobile #ad-container-1 table tr td. Then there are also more relative specific references, such as p:nth-last-of-type(4). But that's in the advanced lesson, lol. CSS is fun! SCSS is even better but needs a processor.

 

[Apple_Robert]

The Adblock Fast review has been posted.

 

[Rigby]

Looks like we have the first adblocker with 3D Touch support. Blockr was just updated. No idea what they use it for since I don't have a 6S model. It's also supposed to be faster (but I haven't really noticed it in short testing). I keep coming back to this app since it has a good balance of configurability and simplicity.

 

[Mactaculious]

Yeah, like the guy below said you need to learn about selectors. This whole discussion could quickly become an introductory course to HTML and CSS, lol. Long story short you don't put periods or hashes in front of elements that don't have any classes or ids. Just use table, tr, td, etc. If you want to target only tables inside another element, then you would do, for instance: .ad-container table. You can mix selectors too. Think of everything as being nested inside everything else. You can also get more specific. For instance a container in the header with a certain table that needs cells styled could be referenced as such: body header nav.mobile #ad-container-1 table tr td. Then there are also more relative specific references, such as p:nth-last-of-type(4). But that's in the advanced lesson, lol. CSS is fun! SCSS is even better but needs a processor.

Ok cool thanks for confirming.

I have blocked a sidebar on boxingscene.com using uBlock Origin and the code is as follows:

center > center > table:nth-of-type(2) > tbody > tr > td > table > tbody > tr:nth-of-type(2) > td:nth-of-type(2) > table > tbody > tr:nth-of-type(1) > td

Do I literally copy this into 1blocker?

And how would you put in spaces? Or do you just use commas in place of spaces? And also the the '>' is that required?

 

[macduke]

Ok cool thanks for confirming.

I have blocked a sidebar on boxingscene.com using uBlock Origin and the code is as follows:

center > center > table:nth-of-type(2) > tbody > tr > td > table > tbody > tr:nth-of-type(2) > td:nth-of-type(2) > table > tbody > tr:nth-of-type(1) > td

Do I literally copy this into 1blocker?

And how would you put in spaces? Or do you just use commas in place of spaces? And also the the '>' is that required?

Not sure what uBlock Origin is. The '>' selector is for direct children, so it depends on the site's layout and I can't look through it right now. But those selectors are getting pretty specific and fairly complex. It's either a really tricky site or really poorly written especially if they heavily use tables. You should be able to use spaces no problem. I'm probably not wording this properly, but spaces are used in selectors to delineate between elements in the nesting. Each one adds specificity. If you don't put a space, such as I was doing today at work with h3.related, then that selects h3s that have the .related class. h3 .related (so with a space) selects h3s that have a .related class inside (such as on a link). So it nests. As for commas, those are separating different elements being selected. So each comma is a different piece of the page being hidden. Each piece between commas is telling what specific part of the page to hide. It can be pretty confusing if you haven't done any webdev before.

 

[Mactaculious]

Not sure what uBlock Origin is. The '>' selector is for direct children, so it depends on the site's layout and I can't look through it right now. But those selectors are getting pretty specific and fairly complex. It's either a really tricky site or really poorly written especially if they heavily use tables. You should be able to use spaces no problem. I'm probably not wording this properly, but spaces are used in selectors to delineate between elements in the nesting. Each one adds specificity. If you don't put a space, such as I was doing today at work with h3.related, then that selects h3s that have the .related class. h3 .related (so with a space) selects h3s that have a .related class inside (such as on a link). So it nests. As for commas, those are separating different elements being selected. So each comma is a different piece of the page being hidden. Each piece between commas is telling what specific part of the page to hide. It can be pretty confusing if you haven't done any webdev before.

uBlock Origin is a ad block for PCs, Macs or Linux OSs. It allows you custom block html elements on the fly on top of ad-blocking.

I was just looking at the uBlock Origin filter to get an idea of the hierarchy. The site itself is pretty old school html, probably from the early 2000s.

Question on the spaces, there is no space icon in 1blocker, which is why i was asking about it. I suppose you could copy and paste in the html code into 1blocker instead? I tried the code I pasted earlier but it didn't hide the side bar.

 

[TheSacredSoul]

Edit : Silly me, figured it out. Red is for beta apps from Testflight and blue is of course for recently updated apps.

Anyone know what are the dots for beside content blockers on the homescreen? Silentium has a red dot and Crystal has a blue dot.

 

[macduke]

uBlock Origin is a ad block for PCs, Macs or Linux OSs. It allows you custom block html elements on the fly on top of ad-blocking.

I was just looking at the uBlock Origin filter to get an idea of the hierarchy. The site itself is pretty old school html, probably from the early 2000s.

Question on the spaces, there is no space icon in 1blocker, which is why i was asking about it. I suppose you could copy and paste in the html code into 1blocker instead? I tried the code I pasted earlier but it didn't hide the side bar.

Oh I see what you're talking about. That is weird. It should probably work if you copy and paste it but idk. I haven't gotten around to making more selectors for removing stuff. The sites I've done so far have well named classes and IDs. Didn't even realize it was missing the space bar. So weird!

 

[ardchoille50]

Edit : Silly me, figured it out. Red is for beta apps from Testflight and blue is of course for recently updated apps.

Anyone know what are the dots for beside content blockers on the homescreen? Silentium has a red dot and Crystal has a blue dot.

The blue dot next to an icon means the app was updated, that dot will disappear once the app is opened. I've never seen any red dots.

 

[Mactaculious]

Oh I see what you're talking about. That is weird. It should probably work if you copy and paste it but idk. I haven't gotten around to making more selectors for removing stuff. The sites I've done so far have well named classes and IDs. Didn't even realize it was missing the space bar. So weird!

Yep, I believe it's going to be added in the update. I saw Twitter post regarding this.

Care to share your custom filters/sites?

 

[DanEp]

I am using Adblock Fast and I'm seeing sponsored ads intermittently but only on:

https://forums.macrumors.com/forums/ios-9.183/

Sponsored ads appear right after the pinned top 4 messages. Anyone else?

I followed the instructions and cleared history and website data. Only appears about 20% of the time.