The makers of Adblock Plus offer web browser plugins that let you surf the web without encountering ads… or at least without seeing ads that have been deemed “acceptable” if you choose not to disable that feature.

There are Adblock Plus plugins for a range of browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer and for Android devices. But now there’s another option: the developers have designed an Adblock Browser for Android — no plugins required.

adblock browser

Adblock Browser is basically a customized version of Mozilla’s open source Firefox web browser. You could also just download Firefox for Android and install an Adblock plugin, but the developers say their browser features tighter integration with the browser which gives them more control over how Adblock works on a mobile device.

That’s one reason Adblock Plus is launching its own browser. Another is that the aforementioned Adblock Plus for Android app never supported encrypted connections and got booted from the Google Play Store for interfering with the performance of other apps (browsers). Theoretically a standalone browser avoids the second problem and gives the developers the ability to tackle the first.

Right now the Adblock Browser is in beta. You can join the beta community on Google Plus to get more information and a download link.

It’s worth noting that if ad blockers become too common, it could dramatically affect the economics of the internet. Right now many websites (including this one) make most of their revenue through advertising. If everyone used ad-blocking software, we’d have to find other revenue streams, close up shop, or treat our work as a hobby rather than a profession.

But at least apps like the Adblock Browser are optional: Users get to decide whether to install and use them, not wireless carriers.

adblock browser_02

It’s also worth noting that you can add sites you want to support to a whitelist so that Adblock Browser will display ads on those sites. Just uncheck the box that says “Block Ads on this Site.”

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14 replies on “Adblock Plus launches an Android web browser”

  1. Looks like Internet advertising needs to change. The old embedded obvious ads which most people only click on accidentally are becoming less and less effective. Not to mention they’re often used to spread malware.

  2. I never knew you could disable AdBlockPlus on one website alone. Go figure, I’ve disabled it on Liliputing just… now!

  3. ABP greatly increases Firefox’s memory and CPU usage. First, there’s a constant overhead just from enabling ABP of something like 60–70 MiB. Second, there’s an overhead of about 4 MiB per iframe, which is mostly due to ABP injecting a giant stylesheet into every iframe. Page with a lot od iframes also loads more slowly with ABP enabled.

  4. Ad blocking has more than one purpose. I don’t run it on some of my machines because websites like Liliputing rely on the revenue ads generate. However, computers with minimal resources load many web pages much faster when ad blockers are installed.

    1. Yep… I admit, Liliputing would load more quickly without ads. Unfortunately it’d also have a lot less content without ads. 🙂

      1. I thought you’d like to know that I also set Liliputing as an exception on my adblocker.

        1. Aww… thanks!

          I try to keep the content-to-ad ratio within reason. We don’t qualify for the Adblock Plus “acceptable ads” policy because we do feature animated ads. But I’ve been pretty strict about staying away from intrusive ads like those annoying ads that pop up when you hover over text in an article, other pop-ups, or interstitial that make you wait before a page loads.

          Basically I don’t accept any of the ads that I hate encountering on other sites. That’s probably bad for business, but it makes me feel better about what I do for a living. 🙂

          1. I really enjoy liliputing. The advertisements are reasonable too. Keep up the great work. Thanks.

          2. i only make exceptions for you and gizmodo uk, nobody else, thanks for your website

          3. Thanks for the reminder, I just disabled ABP for this site, long overdue. Keep creating the great content and I’ll gladly live with the reasonable amount and type of ads you allow.

      2. i’m a regular reader of your blog and very satisfied with it; Liliputing is an exeption to my AdBlocker; using Fedora Linux and Firefox, i just did a test: approximately 12s to load this page with Ads, 3 to 4s without … I can navigate through the page instantly without Ads, not so with Ads: it becomes slowish.

        Plus, as i have no Facebook nor Google account i don’t like them to know i’m reading Liliputing and when. The problem with Ads, is we don’t know where we are redirected on the Internet ; it’s kind of a black hole. The major problem is see with ads is tracking. I suspect Google to know what i’m searching on DuckDuckGo. I have’nt used Google for almost a year but i see targeted ads on sites where AdBlock is disabled. How they do i don’t know.

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