What is the most annoying thing you can stumble upon when browsing the web? One could enumerate quite a few gems of modern online marketing that can disrupt your experience – think overlays, intrusive advertising that covers the whole website, Infolinks that open up a window when you accidentally move your cursor over an underlined keyword, autoplay videos and music, and the list could go on forever.
Things get even worse when you browse the web on the go. Playing pokies on your iPhone is a lot of fun, but when you try to read an article you often wish Steve Jobs would never have presented this revolutionary device.
Over the years, desktop web browsers have received updates and extensions that cleaned up a lot of the mess created by desperate webmasters – ad and popup blockers, autoplay blockers, and their likes – but these are usually not available on said web browsers’ mobile versions. Yet there are ways in which you can turn your mobile browsing experience into a less stressful and more enjoyable one – like the tips below.
Use an RSS reader
When Google phased out its famous feed reader – Google Reader – years ago, many thought RSS was dead. Well, it isn’t – the protocol is alive and kicking, and although there are many websites that don’t use it anymore, you can use it to subscribe to the vast majority of publications. And feed readers are also still around – most of them have a mobile app version that you can use to filter out many of the most annoying features of certain websites.
When you use apps like Feedly, for example, you can browse through the headlines of a certain website and blog without being disturbed by an eventual pop-up or an autoplay video, and only open the articles or news you are interested in. And if the feed is set up the right way, you can even read the contents of the article without it loading any unnecessary graphics, banners, and ads.
AMP
Google has for a long time been an advocate of a mobile friendly web – after all, it is the force behind the most used mobile OS today. One of its latest projects called the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) aims to take mobile-friendliness to the next level: it strips away any unnecessary content, including JavaScript, from the pages that implement it, making mobile websites load much faster. And it eliminates a series of annoying things like popups, overlays, and such, all with JavaScript behind them.
Ad blocking browsers
Ad blockers have been the best thing that happened to desktop web browsers lately – and a feature mobile users have been craving for ages. To make up for this shortcoming, Eyeo, the makers of the famous AdBlock Plus browser extension, has launched a Mozilla-based mobile browser with the functions of AdBlock Plus built into it.
If you are not a devoted Chrome enthusiast on your phone, you can download and install the browser free of charge, and forget about annoying ads once and for all.
