Most websites on the internet display at least one advert. While many websites are happy to use relatively simple ads that aren’t intrusive, some website and advertising companies go out of their way to be as intrusive as possible.
Adverts can be intrusive in both overt and subtle ways. The most obvious intrusive adverts are the ones that overlay large portions of the content of the website, forcing you to close the advert manually. These types of ads are designed to ensure that the reader sees them and to increase the change that you accidentally click on them through the use of tiny buttons to close the ad. Advertisements that include sound on websites that generally don’t use sound are also excessively intrusive.
Behaviour tracking is a subtle part of the intrusive behaviour of adverts. Advertising companies use cookies and other tracking scripts with all of their adverts to monitor your browsing activity. Your browsing data is used to create an “Interest profile” that is then used to target future adverts to you and your interests. The aim of this is to increase the chance that you click on an ad and buy a product because you’re being shown adverts based on your “Interests”. The scale of the tracking can give the advertising companies an unprecedented level of insight into your life.
An ad-blocker allows you to be free of the intrusive nature of adverts and can speed up your browsing experience. Ad-blockers work by identifying web requests for adverts and then prevent your browser from ever requesting the advert. This means you save the extra data and time it would take to download the advert that you don’t want to see. blocking the advert from downloading also prevents the tracking elements from being able to track your browsing activity, giving you more privacy.
How to configure the ad-blocker in the Mint browser
The Mint browser on Android includes a built-in ad-blocker that can be configured via the in-app settings. To be able to access the in-app settings, you first need to tap the triple-dot icon in the top-right corner of the app.
To be toggle the ad-blocker on and off, you can tap “Block ads” in the centre of the drop-down menu.
To open the settings, to configure the ad-blocker, tap the cogwheel icon in the top-left corner of the drop-down menu.
In the settings, tap “Advanced” the fifth option from the bottom.
In the advanced options, the three ad-blocker options are in the top sub-section. “Ad blocker” simply toggles the ad-blocker on and off. “Show Ad blocker notifications” toggles if the alert bubble appears in the top-left corner of the app to show you how many ads were blocked on the page. “Clear ad blocker history” allows you to clear the count of total ads blocked by the ad-blocker.
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