Ad Blockers On Mobile Can Reduce Battery Drain By Up To 50%

Need to get a little more juice from your smartphone's battery? The Wirecutter did an extensive amount of tests to separate battery fact from fiction, and found that one surprising way to reduce consumption was to use an ad blocker.

Like anything online, ads use resources, and if your phone is downloading ad images and video, it's using up energy. How much? Here's The Wirecutter:

We ran an automated Wi-Fi Web-browsing session in Safari on an iPhone 6s, cycling through a set list of websites for two hours with no ad blockers; then we ran the same test with the 1Blocker ad blocker installed. Without the ad blocker, the test used 18 percent of the phone's battery, but with the ad blocker, it used only 9 percent-so viewing ads doubled the impact of Web browsing on the phone's battery! We ran a similar test on a 2015 Moto X Pure using the Ghostery Privacy Browser and got results that were even more dramatic: With no ad blocker, a two-hour browsing session in Chrome used 22 percent of the phone's battery, whereas the Ghostery ad-blocking browser (which uses the same browser engine as Chrome) consumed only 8 percent.

We know ad blocking speeds up browsing, but how it impacted battery life was always up in the air. Running ad blockers is a controversial affair where you're taking away revenue from publishers to reduce the annoyance that is mobile ads, so, regardless of that battery drain, make sure you whitelist the sites you like.