Adverts can present a moral dilemma because some content creators rely on us seeing them in order to be able to provide our favourite content. On the flipside of that argument, many adverts are intrusive to the point of ruining the entire web-surfing experience. We like a nuanced solution, where you can make decisions about the type of advert that gets through.
Opera’s
ad blocker is built in and enabled from the beginning. By default, it’s set to block “intrusive” ads. In use, occasionally, we’d see an advert for a company such as Disney, but we didn’t get pummelled by anything too garish.
Like its privacy features, Brave has comprehensive ad-blocking options that are enabled by default and highly configurable. Selecting between “acceptable”adverts (the default) or no adverts, or disabling the ad blocker for the current website can be done quickly from within the interface. The settings can allow ads on some social media sites, and there’s a novel system where you can earn Basic Attention Tokens for viewing certain ads, and these tokens can be exchanged for actual currency.
Chrome, Firefox
and Edge don’t come with ad blockers built in, but they have ad-blocking add-ons, so you can decide how you want to approach the subject. The most popular plugins tend to default to a blanket approach to blocking all ads.
Edge
has adverts on its own startup page that the ad blocker didn’t seem to be able to do anything about. Brave sells advertising space within its browser. While testing, we only noticed these ads in the new tab news feed.