It\u2019s been an interesting couple of days for Marco Arment – the programmer who gave the world Tumblr and Instapaper (and less famously, a short-lived iOS Newsstand periodical called The Magazine) wrote a new Safari Content Blocker for iOS. Called Peace, and sold for $3, it shot straight to the top of Apple\u2019s App Store sales charts directly it was released.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Today, he pulled it down.<\/a><\/p>\n It\u2019s blunt force trauma, certainly, and I understand his unease with blindly stopping everything. But the point remains just as it was a few months ago when Gruber first addressed this at DF: there is no way a 537-word text posting on a website should be a 14 MB download in the browser.<\/a> None<\/em>. And on mobile devices – where data is usually metered and where every electron of battery is precious – the current state of web advertising is untenable. \u00a0It\u2019s not the fact of advertising that gives offense; that ship sailed decades ago. It\u2019s the fact that the advertising is so resource-hungry. This isn\u2019t billboards on the road, it\u2019s more like being forced to detour and drive down a side street composed of nothing but billboards in order to reach a destination that\u2019s 90 degrees the other way.<\/p>\n Ironically, I\u2019ve been ad-blocking in my own way for a very long time; I\u2019m one of those cranky old dudes still using an RSS reader – in my case, a $2 monthly Feedbin subscription and Reeder for iOS. And just like that, I\u2019m reading about a hundred sites a day, and missing all the pop-ups and JavaScript crap weighing down the modern web.<\/p>\n