How many times have you accidentally navigated off a webpage on your phone and wound up in unfamiliar territory because you tapped the wrong part of an ad? Probably too many. That's where ad blockers come in, and Adblock Plus, or ABP, is among the most popular among desktop users. With Apple now allowing ad blockers on iOS, it's no surprise that Adblock Plus is now a popular iPhone app, too.

Adblock Plus is available for free from the App Store. Assuming you can find it. There are several ad blocker apps with similar names and iconography. The correct one is from developer Eyeo, if that helps. Once it's installed, you'll have to set it up. Adblock Plus walks you through this process with a handy video.

Using Adblock Plus
I test iPhone ad blockers by using the Safari developer tools on both the iPhone and my trusty iMac. Just like a desktop Web inspector, this lets me view the entire structure of webpages viewed on my phone and other vital statistics. When testing, I reload the PCMag mobile page without cached information and average the data.

For this test, I used an iPhone 6 Plus . I chose this particular device because I've never used a phone the size of a boat oar, and I thought that I could grow personally from the experience. Also, it's a top device.

The default settings for Adblock Plus allow nonintrusive ads that comply with the Acceptable Ads standards. For most of my initial testing, I left this feature enabled. I'll have more on Acceptable Ads later, but note that you can use the Settings page within the Adblock Plus app to toggle Acceptable Ads on and off.

In my testing, I found that Safari loaded 32 percent fewer resources when I went to PCMag.com with Adblock Plus installed. Resources include fonts, images, and other elements that make websites work. That includes resources used by ads. Adblock also limits the cookies loaded, and I saw that Adblock loaded 30 percent fewer cookies. Fewer resources means sites take up less space, and I observed that Adblock Plus reduced the total website size by 17.2 percent. This was reflected in a 21.8 percent decrease in page load time.

Sites with more elements that can be blocked by Adblock Plus have even more remarkable results. CNN.com, for example, loads 201 resources, equating about 6.3MB of stuff, in 10.5 seconds. With Adblock Plus in its default configuration, it drops to 136 resources, equaling 4.8MB, in 5.8 seconds.

Sometimes when you use ad blockers, sites don't load correctly. This is usually because the site is just not set up to work properly with elements being blocked. Crystal lets you alert the developer to the issue, but Adblock Plus does not include this feature. That's too bad. Other blockers, including 1Blocker, let you manually add a site to a whitelist and allow it to load ads. Adblock Plus has no such feature.

Source: www.pcmag.com