Opera: Native Ad Blocking in Android, iOS and Windows Phone

Various companies currently offer native ad blocking capabilities for their web browsers, and Opera is not an exception, since it did the same earlier this year, in March. A few months later, it gave the same opportunity to Opera Mini for Android.

Now, Opera announced that this feature will be available on all mobile platforms, such as Android, iOS and Windows Phone.

Ad blocking is getting more and more popular, causing concern among content creators, but this does not decrease the growth of new ad blocking tools.

On the one hand, ad blocking protects users from ads that can lead you to malicious malware, and it also helps to load a page more quickly. On the other hand, however, it reduces the revenues of the creators, who depend on these revenues to create content.

Anyways, ad blocking is here to stay, as it seems. This feature is not enabled by default in Opera, and the user will have to go to Settings and click on Data Savings, in which the option Block Ads is located. When enabled, it will block the ads of the websites that you visit.

Update - We asked Opera to comment on this new ad-blocking feature and here's what they had to say:

Download3k: How will websites monetize their content when users block their ads?

Maria Lorentze Foldal, from Opera: First of all, ads are not blocked by default. Secondly, we're not inherently against ads, just the ones that affect the browsing experience negatively for users. We think contextual, modern (and speedy to load of course!) ads are the way forward and one of the reasons we have the Speed Test in the new feature is so website owners can test their own sites with different types of ads implemented".

[Source: Ubergizmo]