Opera’s Built-In Ad-Blocker Now Live

Not too long ago, the Opera browser has received native ad-blocking features that were made available to developers. From the looks of it, the testing sessions for this ad-blocker were quite successful, as the feature has been recently made available for all users on both desktop and mobile platforms. According to Opera, the browser with this ad-blocker enabled allows for a 45 percent faster experience when compared to Google’s Chrome and its third-party extensions. Moreover, pages now load up to 89 percent faster than without the feature activated, which definitely sounds appealing. The testing was done on a system based on an AMD Phenom II X6 processor, 8 GB of RAM and a 64-bit version of Windows 10, and even though we don’t know exactly what websites were used for this test, Opera says that it used 66 “content-rich” websites and measured the loading speeds with WebDriver.

As far as mobile goes, data suggests that Opera Mini runs 40 percent faster thanks to the ad-blocker, and the device used for these tests was a Nexus 5X with Android Marshmallow. It’s true that Chrome and Safari are still the most popular browsers that support Ad Block Plus, and even though these speed improvements probably won’t result in a substantial popularity increase for Opera, those of you who already use this browser stand to benefit quite a bit. The fact that Opera now includes a free integrated VPM is also nice, of course.