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It seems advertisements are getting more and more annoying as Ad Blocker is now part of Samsung Browsers. The company introduced this week the new service to all of its web browsers on Android devices.
The new update from Samsung comes after a very similar one of its competitor, Apple. Apple launched its personal Ad Blocker last year just in time for the release of iOS 9. Samsung’s update will work on all its devices equipped with Android Lollipop or a higher version. This support will allow developers to build particular applications with the purpose of blocking intrusive advertisements on mobile Internet browsers. Furthermore, developers will be able to get rid of unnecessary content displayed on web pages, thus making them load faster and consume less data.
But what exactly will make these applications work? The well-known API content blocker extension, which has long been available on Internet browsers for personal computers. However, if you wish to have an ad-free experience, you will need to use the Samsung browser, and not one from another company, such as Google Chrome. The extension will be introduced with the next update to the web browser.
So why is Samsung doing this now? The most credible explanation is that it is trying to gather more users for its original apps, since most of us flock to other options. If we take a look at the Google Play Store, we can see that the Samsung browser has more than ten million downloads if we do not count people who own Samsung devices, since these have it pre-installed. However, Google Chrome is still undefeated as the top choice for users, closely followed by Safari for iOS devices.
After the announcement from Samsung, ad blocker developers have already started working and two apps have been published: Adblock Fast and Crystal. Adblock Fast seems to have more than 200,000 users and works on Safari, Chrome and Opera. Furthermore, the application is said to offer several optimized filtering rules for making websites run faster. Crystal has the same list for filters but also claims to block tracking technologies, social networking annoying aspects and malware.
As Ad Blocker is now part of Samsung Browsers, the company will surely record a surge of users, as Apple has also experienced when launching its own ad blocker for iOS. However, surpassing Google Chrome will surely be quite a challenge.
Image Source: Smeu
