I bought a bunch of adblockers for iOS when they came out last year. After repeated experiments, I stuck with 1Blocker — it was extremely fast, very good at dealing with trackers (which I care about most), and streamlining my mobile experience. The latter is probably the most important, since it really helps conserve data when roaming — why would I want to download a 1 MB webpage and 9 additional megabytes of trackers, when I can just download that 1 MB?

I have relied on Ghostery to keep trackers at bay on OS X for a long time now, but since Salavat Khanov — 1Blocker’s creator — came out with an OS X version yesterday, I switched to it immediately.

1Blocker has one benefit over the other players — it uses WebKit blocking technology instead of JavaScript. This means that pre-specified content is blocked before it’s downloaded, and not after. This saves bandwidth. A lot of it. A good enough reason to use it instead of the others. I decided to take a look at how well it fares with a pretty heavy site:

• The Verge w/ 1Blocker — 8.62 MB — 18.2 s
• The Verge w/o 1Blocker — 26.7 MB — 91 s

I am currently tethering my MacBook to my iPad in a remote location, with only 3G access — no LTE sadly. The Verge is but one example of the huge difference 1Blocker makes. I’m sold, after less than one day using it.

1Blocker for Mac has one issue that I hope will be added over time: there is no search field on all the rules it has. This makes it hard to scroll through all of them when looking for just one item.

P.S. It works fine with Safari Technology Preview.

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★ 1Blocker — Mac — €4.99 →
★ 1Blocker — iOS — free →