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Opera now has an ad-blocker caked into its browser

The Opera browser, while not the first choice of internet denizens, has built an ad-blocker into the browser might make more people consider switching from Chrome.

Senior Vice President of Global Engineering, Krystian Kolondra, made the announcement today that the Opera Developer channel would feature a native ad-blocking technology. According to Opera, this native ad-blocker works better than extensions – which we’ll come back to in a bit – because it does the blocking at a web engine level.

“When we started profiling the performance of adblockers, we found that commonly available block lists are of great quality and can block a lot of ads,” Kolondra explained in a blog post. “But, many extensions spend a lot of time checking whether URLs or page elements occur in their block lists.”

According to Opera by using native code and a fast algorithm, its service doesn’t get bogged down with the checking of adverts.

To verify this “better than extensions” claim, we tested the Opera ad-blocker as well as everybody’s favourite “pay what you want” Ad-blocker and the results follow below.

So yes Opera’s ad-blocker is faster but only by a margin of two seconds.

The Developer version of the browser also allows you to see how quickly a web page loads with and without adverts, the results of our test are below.

adblock-speed_test

As you can see blocking advertisements took the load time from 9.72 seconds down to 4.07 seconds. These load speeds to vary from connection to connection but if you have a slow connection such as 3G, or your internet service provider has shaped you, those few seconds make all the difference.

Opera draws on the same list Ad-Blocker uses to block intrusive ads, namely, Easy List.

We should point out that Opera is not trying to kill advertising, but rather drive a change where ads are less intrusive and don’t impact the loading times of websites as much as they currently do.

The service is – as we’ve mentioned – only available on the developer version of Opera for now. The firm has said that once all the checks and balances have been completed the feature will be rolled-out to the stable version of the browser.

So the question now is, do you carry on using your browser with an extension or will you switch to Opera?

As always, let us know in the comments.

[Source – Opera] [Image – Opera]

 

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