Block ads in iOS 9 with Peace
Ad-blockers are proving to be extremely popular with the early adopters of iOS 9. Shortly after the operating system's debut, Peace skyrocketed to the top of the paid apps chart on Apple's App Store, taking Minecraft: Pocket Edition's place on the podium, while rival Purify Blocker has risen to fourth place.
Current leader Peace is the work of iOS developer Marco Arment, best known for the popular read-it-later app Instapaper. Since Peace will surely get the attention of many more users, let's take a look at what it has to offer.
Let's get this out of the way first. As implied in the opening paragraph, Peace is not free. It costs $2.99, which is not high price to pay for being able to block ads, reduce cellular data traffic and speed up your browsing experience. It actually costs less than its closest rival, as Purify Blocker is listed for $3.99. But whether it is actually worth it, it is up to you to decide.
In its current iteration, Peace comes with the sort of features that you can expect from a typical ad-blocker, namely ad and tracker blocking, but also the options to block social widgets, external fonts and hide comments.
For the ad and tracker database, Arment has teamed up with Ghostery, which, based on his testing, has been found to be superior to other solutions thanks to a more robust implementation which creates fewer compatibility issues, and more efficient tracker blocking.
However, in my brief testing of Ghostery's Chrome extension on my Mac I have noticed that it falls a bit short when compared to the popular AdBlock Plus, causing some rendering issues and failing to block some ads.
Given that support for ad-blockers is offered through Safari, you are forced to use Apple's browser to fully benefit. Peace can also be triggered in apps that integrate with Safari, so you can apply the content-blocking capabilities in more scenarios, through its Open in Peace extension.
Users appear to be happy with Peace, as the app has mostly received five star ratings so far (201 out of 210, at the time of writing this article, so there are few unsatisfied users).
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