I am currently using Crystal. And boy, does it make a difference! Tested it with iMore, since I knew it always takes a lot of time to load. With the adblocker enabled, that website literally flies in Safari. It's incredible! You don't know half how much I love Apple for having iOS 9 support 'content blockers'. Of course they knew most of these content blockers were going to be adblockers.
And I think it's good that they've done this. Not entirely to mock website owners because of all their ads. But also so they will realize that the current ad model just doesn't work. Especially with sites like iMore. It's just ridiculuous how slow it loads with all those ads. They're going to have their game changed if they want to prevent people from using adblockers.
How will that happen, other than creating paywalls or going out of business?
It would be really awesome if someone could test all of most popular content blocker (Blockr, Crystal, Purify, Peace, etc.).
For the moment I will stay with Crystal since it's free and hopefully will get more options when it becomes premium.
It appears that Crystal is no longer free. Granted, it's only .99.
Oh note I'm only referring to blockers that do both ads and trackers. There are some privacy-only ones such as peace which uses the excellent ghostery database.
Peace blocks ads too. I'm using it and it works really well. Has a comment blocking option as well, which is nice.
It's amazing how much guerilla markting there is for these adblockers. Seems like the developers are expecting a big bonanza.
People should realize that all of them use the same blocking mechanism, meaning that the actual blocking is performed by Webkit, not the blocker apps. They only provide the filtering rules. The differences will be in the user-configurable customization options and the amount of work the developers put into optimizing the rule sets for Webkit. I bet we'll see a wave of cheap blocker apps that simply take some existing rule set (like Easylist) and translate it to the Apple format, and only a few developers will take the time to create optimized rule sets to make sure they can be executed efficiently by Webkit ...
And that's probably pretty much the last thought I'll give these ad blockers.
Yep. Crystal + Peace seems a good combo.
For the moment it's still the beginning of those content blockers and in the near future (3-4 months) I am sure we will see some good update or new players (adblock, ublock, perhaps ad.guard and ghostery itself).
It appears that Crystal is no longer free. Granted, it's only .99.
Use the share sheet extension to report this issue to the developer of Crystal; he is usually quite prompt when it comes to resolving such issues.Using Crystal right now with no complaints. However due to several comments above (blocking video on IGN), I am probably going to make the switch to Blockr.
Crystal is doing fine, it was free when I got it. I tested 1Blocker as well, basically to complement Crystal with a tracking block list. There will be more blockers soon and they will inevitably be free.
It doesn’t feel right to me to pay that much for an adblocker. A tip is alright to cover the expenses for the developer licence, but not €3 or even €4. Not only are they earning money from interfering with other people’s business model, they are also free-riding on the work done by those who maintain the block lists in the first place as well as the open source code of existing browser extensions and the work done by Apple to make the blockers possible. The amount of code needed to create a blocker is trivial and there are ample of open source examples on Github that people can use. This feels like an opportunistic cash-grab to me and I’m not supporting it, even though I recognise that some amount of work has been poured into the development of these apps.
I would go for the others. It's important to whitelist your favorite sites