Samsung has added support for ad-blocking plug-ins to the browser that comes preinstalled on its smartphones, which will make it easier for consumers who own its Android smartphones to block marketers’ ads.

Samsung began pushing the updated browser to its smartphone owners with the Android Marshmallow operating system. It plans to make it available to those with the older Android Lollipop operating system in the coming months.

The updated browser doesn’t block ads on its own. Instead, it lets consumers install apps that block ads from websites they visit in much the same way that ad-blocking works in Apple Inc.’s iOS 9 Safari browser that Apple released last September.

16% of the U.S. online population, roughly 45 million U.S. consumers, took steps to block digital ads from loading on their screens in the second quarter of 2015, a 48% year-over-year increase,  analytics vendor PageFair Ltd. and Adobe Systems Inc. note in a recent report. The Samsung news could increase that percentage.

Or, if it follows the trajectory observed after Apple’s ad-blocker release, it could have minimal effect. In the week following the iOS 9 release, Branding Brand, the mobile technology vendor with the most clients among Internet Retailer’s Top 1000, was unable to recognize 7.7% of iOS 9 users, which it attributed to the installation and use of ad blockers. However that percentage soon declined. In the fourth week after the ad-blocker release, the percentage dropped to 2.5% of all iOS 9 users, and eight weeks after the release, 1.1% of iOS 9 users were using an ad blocker.

“Ad blockers seem to be losing popularity [on iOS 9], but there is still a group of visitors who use them,” says Chris Mason, CEO of Branding Brand.

Part of that may be due to poor user reviews, Mason says, pointing to reviews where consumers say an ad blocker prevented video content or social media comments they wanted to see from loading. “Ad-blocker tools failed on their core benefit to provide a better site-browsing experience to collective customers,” he says.

Mobile Strategies 360 sister publication Internet Retailer examined whether retailers should be concerned about the increasing prevalence of ad blockers in its January issue. Click here to read “Should retailers worry about ad blockers?”

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