Samsung will allow mobile ad blockers for the first time

Samsung is now allowing users to install ad blocker on its Galaxy smartphones. The South Korean electronics giant has added support for content and ad blockers to its pre-installed Samsung internet browser.

Samsung will include the ad blocking functionality in its Samsung Internet browser through an over-the-air (OTA) update. Starting today, the updated browser will be rolled out to Samsung phones with Android Marshmallow on board. The company hopes to roll out the update to handsets running on Android Lollipop in the coming months, reports The Verge.

Web pages loaded without ads are much smaller than filled with advertisement content. Ad blockers reduce the page loading time as well as mobile data usage.

For this, Samsung decided to team up with Adblock Fast, which is available on iOS as well as Chrome and Opera on desktops and laptops. Users can download Adblock Fast from Play Store for free. Adblock Fast has over 200,000 users across various platforms.

According to a blog post by Adblock Fast, with the software installed, web pages on Android loads 51 percent faster than before. But it is yet to see that how many people will actually prefer using Samsung’s browser over Google Chrome on their Android devices.

The Samsung ad blocking feature resembles the way it works with Apple’s Safari browser on iOS 9. Apple iPhone users can install ad blockers as extension for Safari. Thus, they can block annoying content including images, advertisements, pop-ups and other unnecessary web content while browsing on Safari. Apple released the update to iOS 9 back in September 2015.

Last year, in December, Asus announced that in 2016, the company’s mobile devices will ship with in-built AdBlock Plus, popular Chrome and Firefox extension that blocks ads, as reported by Engadget.