Opera has brought in a native ad blocker on its desktop and mobile browser. The ad blocker needs to be manually enabled for you to block ads, but it is yet another indication of the direction where the industry is heading to. With Ad revenues a major revenue source for small to medium-sized publishers as well as Google, this is not very positive news. There are several browsers, including the likes of UC Browser, which already block all the display ads to give the users a seamless and clean experience.
Opera recently had brought in VPN inbuilt on its desktop browser and this latest move clearly is a move to discourage users from having a lot of plug-ins which tend to make the experience slower. On mobile, Opera Mini is one of the most popular browsers out there and comes pre-bundled with plenty of mid-range devices. Opera is also rolling out an ad blocker feature on Opera Mini, which would allow you to not only have a good experience on mobile but also will save excessive data usage that loading ads causes.
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Lars Boilesen, CEO of Opera said:
Opera is the first browser company to offer a native ad blocker across devices. We do this because we want to provide people with the fastest browsers in the market. Our speed test shows that online ads slow down the browsing experience. Now, with Opera, you can browse a lot faster than, for example, in Chrome.
Opera has already tested the feature on the Developer version, and therefore has decided to bring it to the final build. if you go ahead and download the latest Opera build, you will get the ad blocker option by default.
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