Opera is fed up with online advertising, and as such has announced a developer version of its browser, which comes with an ad-blocking technology which is turned on by default. For those totally against ad-blocking the technology can be turned off easily – however the ad blocking technology does offer a roughly 40% faster browsing experience when compared to third party ad-block plugins. Furthermore it doesn’t have much of the performance issues a separate extension would have since everything is integrated directly into the browser.
And that’s ultimately Opera’s problem. They understand that advertising has to exist to power many of the websites users use their browser to access – however they also want their users to have a fast and delay-free browsing experience. Talk about problems …
As our new research shows, most webpages today are significantly slowed down by bloated ads and heavy tracking. We don’t accept it — we want the Web to be a better place for us all, as users.
A rather interesting feature is the the ability to run benchmark tests which let you see how various tracking scripts and ads effect a websites load times. A great tool for developers working on perfecting their load times.
Check out the video above to get a preview of how the new technology works. Then head on over here to download the Opera Developer browser and experience an ad-less browsing experience for yourself.