Apple gives Safari in iOS 9 support for ad blockers

Apple will build support for ad blockers in Safari in iOS 9. Developers can make extensions with ‘content blockers’ for Apple’s browser from that version, according to the developer documentation.

An accompanying image on the Safari 9.0 developer page even shows the menu for an ad blocker in Safari for OS X as an example of what “content blocking” can do in Safari. It is also possible to prevent the placing of cookies or the downloading of images. Developers must specify in a json file which content on which pages they want to block. A Reddit user discovered the change in the developer documentation.

It is unknown why Apple added the feature to Safari for iOS. In Safari for OS X, ad blockers are already possible due to the support for all kinds of extensions, but the Safari in OS X El Capitan also gets support for ‘content blocking’ in Safari itself.

Apple presented iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan Monday during the keynote at its own developer conference WWDC. Both operating systems are already available as test versions for developers and will be released to the general public this fall.