Opera for Android: How to Configure Ad-Blocker

An ad-blocker is almost a necessary tool when browsing the modern internet. Most websites have a few adverts per page, while some go way over the top, with dozens of ads that get in the way of viewing the content. Ad-blockers prevent ads from ever downloading, saving you the data required to download them, and from having to look at them.

For a long time, ad-blockers were only available as extensions for desktop browsers, mobile browsers didn’t offer the same extension support. More recently though, some mobile browsers have included a built-in ad-blocker, meaning that mobile users can now have an ad-free browsing experience.

The Opera browser on Android is one of those browsers that includes a built-in ad-blocker. You can configure its specific settings from within the in-app settings.

To be able to access the in-app settings, you first need to tap the Opera icon in the bottom-right corner of the app.

From the popup menu, you can toggle the ad-blocker on and off by tapping the top entry “Ad blocking”. Toggling the ad-blocker on or off will only take effect after any open pages are reloaded.

To configure the ad-blocking settings, you will need to tap “Settings” at the bottom of the popup menu.

In the settings, tap the label of the third option “Ad blocking” to manage the ad-blocker settings, or the slider to toggle the ad-blocker on and off.

There are four settings you can configure for the ad-blocker, the first of which is “Allow Acceptable Ads”. Acceptable Ads is a program which encourages advertisers to create less intrusive ads to try to win people back over from blocking annoying ads. Enabling this setting will block all ads apart from those that comply with the Acceptable Ads scheme.

“Block cookie dialogs” configures the browser to hide the cookie warning notices that most websites display. Similarly, “Automatically accept cookie dialogs” will accept the hidden cookie notification rather than just hiding and ignoring it.

“Excluded sites” is where you can configure any sites that you want to exclude from all ad-blocking.

After tapping on “Excluded sites” you can see a list of websites that you’ve excluded from ad-blocking. You can delete an entry by swiping right on it and add a new one by tapping the blue plus icon in the bottom-right corner.

Tip: In our testing, adding an excluded site was unreliable at best. It’s unclear if this is a bug with the tested version, or if the feature is not particularly stable, so your mileage may vary.