Opera adds in built ad-blocker for its desktop browser, becomes first major PC browser to do so

With ever growing annoyance due to style and type of ads served on your desktop browser, here is a news which will give you some relief. Opera has just announced its latest development on desktop browser and claims to have achieved almost double speed, yes you read it right. Today in an official press release Opera announced integration of ad-blocking technology in its desktop browser which improves the performance significantly or as stated by company , "Opera browser nearly doubles speed by integrating ad-blocking technology directly into browser engine." 

Opera with In-built ad-blocker

Integrated ad-blocker is said to be 40% more efficient than third party ad-blocker extensions on browsers and the in case of integrated ad-blocker the filtering is done at web-engine level and browser have full control over the content which is not possible in case of third party extensions. 

Since the ad-blocking feature, available in the developer version of Opera for computers, is fully integrated with the browser, no additional download of extensions or plug-ins is necessary.While browsing, users can easily choose to enable ad-blocking by selecting the dialog option.

Opera Browser also shared their testing data and results in the press statement. Opera tested the page-loading time of 66 popular websites, comparing the Opera browser with integrated ad-blocking technology to Chrome and Firefox, both with the Adblock Plus extension. Opera also tested the loading time on Microsoft Edge, but without an ad-blocking extension, as there was none on the market at the time of the tests.

The test measured the time needed for a browser to download the page and render it (precisely between the events navigationStart and loadEventEnd). The page-loading test was repeated 15 times for each page without cleaning the cache, to simulate regular usage. The test results may obviously vary depending on the hardware configuration and network latency (and actuals ads served). Opera’s test was conducted on a modern Windows 10 PC, 8GB RAM, SSD disk, and an Intel Core i7 processor on board. 

In recent years, the increasing number of online ads has become one of the major annoyances of web browsing, driving more and more people to use ad-blocking software. The number of people using ad-blocking tools grew by 41% worldwide and by 48% in the United States between Q2 2014 and Q2 2015, with 98% of those users being on PCs.

“Growing demand for ad-blocking tools tells us that the current approach to advertising is damaging user’s online experiences. It interrupts your web-surfing, slows down your browser, and, at Opera, we want to fix it," Kolondra continues.