BlockBear!

Surprise Surprise, the developers of one of the best VPN services around has also designed a Safari blocking program to help make surfing the Internet a lot less painful. I’ve been a paid Tunnel Bear member for years now. I enjoy their funny and lively marketing and reliable service to protect my traffic and enable something blocked sites from public access points I use regularly. This new app helps keep your browsing many times less cluttered by all the ads and customization various web design company’s add onto their sites. It’s simple and functional. CHECK IT OUT..

Everyone should use an ad blocker and Block Bear is the best one I've found. I've tried a lot of them. Block Bear offers the best and easiest to use ad blocker available for ios users. While it doesn’t always block everything and sometimes it blocks things it shouldn’t it still works better than most. Plus it’s free! If it blocks something it shouldn’t you can just add that site to your whitelist to unblock it. There are 2 ways to white listsomething theoretically...but only one way works. To whitelist a webpage just open the app and copy/paste the link of the site you want to block to Block Bears whitelist. The other alternative to add a site to your whitelist is to use the share extension in Safari...but this method has never worked for me which is unfortunate because it’s the faster alternative. The reason it seems that the Safari share extension doesn’t work is because instead of accurately copying the website address Block Bear copies a different link instead of the actual website link. This erroneous link always includes 'ycombinator' in the text. I'm not sure what ycombinator even is but it never works. This bug has existed as long as Block Bear has. So as long as you know that and stick to using the app to whitelist sites you want to block you'll be fine!

This app hits a balance that not enough do. It gives you just enough options, while staying very simple. I similarly liked Firefox Focus too, but noticed that it would sometimes leave empty boxes where ads were blocked, and didn't allow any whitelisting, at least not from Safari. Blockbear covers both of these things! I just wish they had it for Mac Safari too, I'll try out Nope for that.

Much improved over my try at it a year or so ago.. seems to block most things but a few still slip thru. If it could somehow allow you to flag or report adds that get by it would be a final improvement. Maybe you can already do this but if so it isn't obvious how that is done. I ended up with a much faster internet connection and a data limit so not having all of those useless adds chipping away at my data bank makes more sense now than ever. Overall data usage is significantly and noticeably less.

I have been getting messages like the following that prove to me that it IS WORKING perfectly. Quote "Pleasee add us to your whitelist. Once you turn off your adblock software or whitelist this site you should be able to see the kind of Google ad below that when people click on them it helps to fund the site and then hit the back button to read the post you were aiming for."