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Samsung's Preloaded Browser for Android Gets Ad Blocking Support

Samsung's Preloaded Browser for Android Gets Ad-Blocking Support

By Manish Singh | Updated: 1 February 2016 11:15 IST

Another major industry player is taking a stand against ads on the Web. Samsung has enabled support for content and ad-blocking plugins on its browser, Internet, which comes preinstalled on every handset it sells running Android Lollipop and higher.

The South Korean smartphone manufacturer is now allowing users to install ad and content blocking plugins to strip ads from the Web pages that they visit on their Web browser. A content blocker named Adblock Fast is already available for Samsung's Internet Web browser. The plugin, which boasts more than 200,000 users, is also available on iOS, Chrome, and Opera Web browsers.

Samsung's move to enable this controversial feature follows a similar content blocking option that Apple introduced with iOS 9 last year. Samsung is not the first Android smartphone manufacturer to announce such an option for its users. Asus announced last month that many of its smartphones sold this year will have adblocking feature enabled by default.

There's a lot of controversy around ad-blocking tools. On one hand, they help users with the option to reduce data and other resources, and also reduce webpage loading time, on the other, they are significantly curtailing a Web publisher's ad revenue.

Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an organisation that develops standards for the online advertising industry, delivered a fiery speech at the firm's annual Leadership Summit earlier this month. He that ad-blocking companies are "immoral, mendacious coven of techie wannabes."

Google remains tight-lipped on its stance on ad-blocking technologies. Chrome Web browser currently doesn't support ad and content blocking plugins on Android and iOS. The Web client, on the other hand, does.

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