Hello folks, My iPhone 4s loaded with iOS 7.1.2 is very stable an does everything that I need it to do so I have never felt it necessary to upgrade either the hardware or OS. However, one complaint I have is that VO is not smart enough to filtera out ads when reading web pages in Safari. To see if this situation could be improved I was playing with a couple of ad block apps downloaded from the app store. I'm not sure how I managed to fumble the app installation but whatever I did broke something in iOS such that I no longer had network connectivity , Wifi or cellular. Power cycling and resetting the phone did nothing to help. Also, I could not reset the phone back to factory defaults since I was required to enter my Apple ID which was impossible since I could not connect to the internet. After awhile it seemed my only choice was to put the phone into recovery mode and use iTunes to restore the phone back to factory defaults. This , of course, meant that I was forced to load the dreaded iOS 8.2. This was something I had been avoiding after reading the negative comments that iOS 8 was receiving.anyway, I duly went ahead and eventually got my phone working again with all my apps and music restored.
I have to say that I was very relieved to find the migration to iOs 8 was relatively painless. I have seen several posts that suggest that the 4s becomes very sluggish with iOS 8 installed. Certainly it's no speed demon but for the things that I do it is perfertly usable.
Anyway, now that I have got that out of the way I would welcome recommendations for a trustworthy app that filters/blocks ads in web pages. Thanks in advance.
Comments
Ios 8.2 on iPhone 4S
Are you able to use all visual accessibility features on your 4S now that its running ios 8.2? I have a 4S that I have not updated from ios 7 because I am afraid it will not work reliably with Voiceover, which is what happened to my iPad 2 when I updated it.
Reader
Some web sites are thoughtfully designed to work with Reader, when Voiceover tells me that Reader is available I tap the Reader icon and that gets rid of all content except the text of the article or story or whatever is the gist of the web page.
Not recommended
Hello Betsy,
After more extensive testing I have reached the conclusion that moving to iOS 8.2 on the 4s is not a good idea. I'm finding that Safari and VO don't play well together. For example, using a two finger scrub to go back a page often causes Safari/vo to freeze and it is often necessary to kill and restart safari to get things working again.
Personally, I feel that 8.2 does not give you anything that you cannot already do with 7.1.2 unless you need the latest apps such as KNFB Reader in which case you are looking at a phone upgrade anyway.
Based on my brief experience so far I would not recommend installing 8.2 on a 4s.
Thank you for your excellent tip about the reader button. I tried it on a problem page and it worked perfectly. I've always wondered what that button was sor!
Ios 8 and the 4S
Thank you Frank for sharing the dismal outcome of your upgrade. I wish Apple had not made ios 8 available for the 4S or the iPad 2. My iPad 2 was so erratic and unreliable I had to buy an Air and I am even afraid to update it.
Update
Hello Folks,
Since installing iOS 8.2 on my 4s and suffering the resulting instability when using Safari I have been exploring my options.
I guess the easy way out is to simply buy a newer phone but i still have a bitter taste in my mouth and I don't feel like rewarding Apple for breaking my perfectly functional 4s. I'm very disappointed that Apple would release defective software while disallowing roll-back to a known good working version of iOS.
I have found discussion on the web about using a hacker approach to rolling back iOS versions but it looks very sketchy to me and I think that would be a desparate move to go that route.
I have also investigated a few alternatives to Safari. The best one I have found so far is Google Chrome. I have been using Chrome for a couple of days now and find it very stable with no crashes or freezes seen so far. Sadly, Chrome lacks the features and level of integration provided by Safari but it does provide basic web browsing capabilities without the instability of Safari. For me, a big annoyance is the lack of iOS compatible gestures for navigating pages. However, for now it is an acceptable work-around until iOS 8.3 is released and fixes everything ... right?
FWIW I have also reported this problem toApple accessibility but I would imagine that Apple is not interested in looking at 4s problems as it is probably getting very close to the end of its support cycle.
Hopefully there will be some fixes in future releases of iOS 8 before iOS 9 appears.