We spent last week at Apple’s WWDC17 in San Jose, CA. We were excited and intrigued to see Apple announce that Intelligent Tracking Prevention is coming to Safari on iOS and macOS. We had a chance to talk to many Apple engineers at WWDC labs and we think this feature is going to make a big impact.

What is Intelligent Tracking Prevention?

Intelligent Tracking Prevention is a new feature built in Safari that reduces cross-site tracking by limiting cookies and other website data. Apple uses a machine learning classifier to determine domains that have the ability to track you. This is done by collecting statistics on resource loads and your interactions with websites (taps and text inputs). It’s important to note that all of this happens directly on device and there is no global blacklist stored on a server.

Intelligent Tracking Prevention vs Safari Content Blockers

We asked Safari team engineers at WWDC what is their vision for Intelligent Tracking Prevention and native Safari content blockers (such as 1Blocker). From what we have heard from multiple sources, Apple sees ITP and Safari content blockers as completely separate features that supplement each other. They are not redundant.

ITP and Safari content blockers take different approaches but they are both aimed at protecting user’s privacy. The key difference is that ITP doesn’t block requests sent to trackers like 1Blocker does. ITP just strips cookie and other data from your requests, which means that you won’t get any speed increase and data savings from ITP. And contrary to common misconception, this feature has nothing to do with blocking ads because the appearance of websites stays exactly the same, as Craig Federighi pointed out during the WWDC Keynote.

More details on our blog.

Our recommendation is to use both Intelligent Tracking Prevention and 1Blocker to protect yourself from being tracked on the Web.

Today we are very excited to announce that 1Blocker reached a milestone of ✨ 1,000,000 app downloads on the App Store.

It’s hard to wrap our heads around how huge a million actually is. Here are a couple fun facts which help us visualize this number better:

• A million minutes is almost two years. On average, someone in the world got a copy of 1Blocker every minute since the release of the app in September of 2015.
• If we took all these people and created a new city called Blockerville, it’d be in Top 10 most populous cities in the US, surpassing San Francisco and Washington.

If you look through the App Store, extremelly small portion of apps is able to sustain themselves and continue evolving after the initial launch popularity spike (this is especially true for the majority of other content blockers). We are still working hard to continue holding the title of the best content blocker.

We can’t be more grateful to every one of you for your support, valuable feedback, and of course, for upgrading to our Premium version (you are the only reason we are able to keep working on the app).

Thank you! 💜

Wondering how to hide everything that annoys you on mobile sites using our visual editor right in Safari? Thorin Klosowski explains it beautifully in his detailed review.

[Lifehacker]

🔥 New update is out! You can now easily hide annoying page elements right in Safari.

John Voorhees reviews the new feature on MacStories:

I am impressed with how well 1Blocker’s new feature works. It didn’t work every single time, but it worked well enough and is so simple to use that I expect to keep using it a lot to hide things like sidebars, chat boxes, and social sharing buttons.

1Blocker’s update is an excellent example of how the value of a power-user feature can be unlocked by making it quick and painless for everyone to use, which is a big win, even if you know how to wade through a site’s CSS.

More exciting news: celebrating today's update, 1Blocker for Mac is currently on sale, 50% off.

The best Safari content blocker for OS X, period. ✊

1Blocker for Mac is available on the Mac App Store for $4.99.

Full review by John Voorhees on MacStories.

Installing an ad blocker will greatly extend battery life. [The New York Times]

Wirecutter found that an ad blocker reduced battery drain by 50%. That is a lot of percent. [Wirecutter]

“We’re not afraid to declare 1Blocker is the only ad blocker you’ll ever need on your iPhone” [ExpressVPN]

1Blocker crossed 500,000 users last weekend. Thank you for support, everyone. We have great plans for the next year. Enjoy your holidays! 🎉🎊

1Blocker is the clear winner for configurability and speed 🏆

[Brooks Review]

1Blocker is out! Save battery and cut mobile browsing traffic in half by blocking ads & tracking scripts. Available on the App Store worldwide.