For several years now my nephew has touted the virtues of ad blockers. I didn’t pay much attention, because I didn’t find the ads all that annoying, and felt they were easy to ignore. After all I grew up in the commercial TV era of the 50s and 60s where commercials were just part of the TV viewing experience. Or we viewed them like an intermission: a time to get up and get a snack. Streaming has totally altered our viewing experience, making us, I think, less tolerant of ads.
However, within the last year I’ve noticed that when I conduct a search on Amazon half the page is filled with ads instead of search results. Which is especially annoying when half the ads don’t even relate to the product I’m searching for.
Google is almost as bad. YouTube is becoming impossible: ads you can’t skip and ads peppered throughout the video.
Then there are the websites where there are so many ads and pop-ups I can’t even find the content that I was searching for. Add to that all those annoying EU privacy content banners, and I’d rather stay off the Internet than put up with all that.
Everyone’s desire to make a buck, or protect me from myself, was ruining my content searching and entertainment experience.
Having reached the end of my rope the other day, I looked at reviews of ad blockers for my Safari browser. There are several good ones out there, and after reading what they could and couldn’t do I decided to plunk down 2 bucks and buy the Wipr app.
Then my nephew started telling me about the Brave browser. It sounded intriguing, so I downloaded it (it’s free) and have been giving it a try.
My initial impression is that it works fairly well. With the Brave browser, and using DuckDuckGo as the search engine, I have an ad free search experience of the Internet. On YouTube I see no ads. On Amazon, most of the ads have vanished. I have run across sites where Brave did not filter out those annoying little videos that sites are now hosting, or filter out pop-ups. Brave also doesn’t seem to get rid of those annoying EU cookie notifications.
Thus far I’d have to say that Brave has done a decent job and has made a dent in the annoying ad problem. I’ll give the browser a B-.
What I definitely don’t like about Brave is that it is apparently built from the Chrome browser, because it has the same look and feel as Chrome — and I hate Chrome. And that is a major downside to the browser for me.
Being the dedicated Safari user that I am, I may end up spending the two bucks to get Wipr. That way I can use my Safari browser, and be ad free. Because Wipr is supposedly merciless when it comes to ad elimination.
In the meantime, I have switched from Google to DuckDuckGo as my search engine on Safari. That has helped a little bit with cutting out ads on general Internet searches.
I don’t know why it took me so long to finally make the decision to go ad free. But now that I have I am once again enjoying YouTube and searching for items of interest on the Internet and Amazon. And who knows? With Wipr I might reach a totally ad free experience. That, of course, remains to be seen.
Comments are always welcome. And until next time, happy ad-free searching!
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