Mobile Ad Blockers Can Reduce Battery Consumption by up to 50%
Want to get a little more power from your smartphone’s battery? Wirecutter ran a lot of tests to separate battery fact from fiction , and found that one amazing way to reduce consumption was to use an ad blocker.
Like everything on the Internet, ads use up resources, and if your phone is loading promotional images and videos, it is wasting energy. How many? Here are the wire cutters:
We launched an automatic Wi-Fi browsing session in Safari on iPhone 6s, looping through a given list of websites for two hours without ad blockers; Then we conducted the same test with the established blocker advertising 1Blocker . Without an ad blocker, the test used 18 percent of the phone’s battery, but with an ad blocker, it only used 9 percent, so viewing ads doubled the impact of web browsing on phone battery! We ran a similar test on a 2015 Moto X Pure using the Ghostery Privacy Browser and got even more impressive results: without ad blocking, a two hour browsing session in Chrome consumed 22 percent of the phone’s battery, while a Ghostery ad blocking browser (which uses the same browser engine as Chrome) consumes only 8 percent.
We know ad blocking makes browsing faster , but how it affected battery life has always remained unknown . Launching ad blockers is a controversial business when you take revenue from publishers to reduce the annoyance of mobile ads, so no matter how low your battery is, make sure you whitelist the sites you like. Check out The Wirecutter for the rest of their extensive battery drain tests.
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