Yes, there's a few features of WebExtensions that Safari chose not to implement. I'm having a hard time finding the article and discussion about this. The missing features prevent ad blockers like uBlock Origin from working.
This was a complete deal breaker for me. Half the internet is unusable without a decent ad blocking implementation these days and a decent one is virtually impossible with the charred remains of the API they left behind.
This was actually one of the (many) things that motivated me to migrate away from OSX.
You're not going to find the same AdBlockers that Chrome/FF have, but you will find AdBlockers that _work_. I agree that ads make the web unusable, but I've been content with the various blockers I've tried on Safari, and there's more every day. I use ABP, but 1Blocker and Wipr look good, and Safari's got the first 30% of privacy/adblocking taken care of with their various privacy and reader features.
I'm using AdGuard and it covers pretty much everything and is very customizable, including the annoying "accept cookies" banners that we have in Europe.
The Electron app needs to run to set options or to force filters update, not the rest of the time. It's still an annoyance but it's better than nothing.
why does it work like this in macos? (meaning - it seems to be running an outside process to block ads, unlike in Chrome where the process is internal to the browser, is this correct?
as a windows user i was puzzled by this when installing adguard
It doesn't, the Adguard developers just chose to write their app in such a way that their main app (which is an Electron app) needs to be in the loop for everything.
Actually it's true - Adguard needs to run as a standalone process that lives in the menu bar in order to work properly with Safari. This permanent process does appear to be Electron based.
My guess is that it's engineered like this to simplify their code base(s) between their various free plugins and their paid "Adguard for Mac" and "Adguard for Windows" apps.
This isn't that effective anymore. A lot of sites now proxy their ads through their own Web server for the express purpose of making them harder to block. The only way to effectively block these, without something horribly draconian like breaking TLS, is a browser extension.
This doesn't mean what you think it means. What you wrote means that web sites put text on their pages stating, "We're proxying our ads so you can't block them, nanny nanny boo boo!"
You probably mean "specific" purpose.
More to the point, this isn't new. We were doing this on web sites at least as far back as the early 2000's.
Uh, no GP's usage was fine. Take Collins dictionary: "If you refer to an express intention or purpose, you are emphasizing that it is a deliberate and specific one that you have before you do something".
Perhaps you are thinking of the term "express written consent", but there it's the word "written" that means it was, well, written.
Note also that the existing Safari adblock implementation is not subject to the hard limit of 30,000 rules that Chrome had announced in their V3 manifest format, as you can enable more rule sets to get around length limits. And now, on macOS Safari, you can add companion extensions that could monitor and modify the page after the fact if you need additional scripts to run, but at the cost of privacy and battery life...
I personally use AdGuard, 1Blocker and (my favourite) Small Technology Foundation’s Better Blocker (formerly Ind.ie). I use all three of them (but without any companion extensions, for privacy) on both iOS and macOS and rarely see any ads except the occasional static image that sometimes slips through. edit: I reported the ads I did see and they’re gone now from the sites that had them. So yes, I see no current limitations with Apple’s adblocking system except that it doesn’t apply to other apps, just Safari or other apps using Safari.
Well, the workaround is to append them to all lists. Which has the downside of requiring recompilation of all lists which might take a couple seconds on a slower device, but it certainly works. I do it for my personal adblocker.
Honestly I've been finding ad blockers much less useful over time. Seems like every page I visit these days blocks the content until I disable it, if it's not an outright paywall. I think I spend more time disabling my ad blocker temporarily than I save by not loading ads in the first place.
Do others find that ad blockers actually still work well?
Meanwhile, reader mode in Safari will generally hide every ad on the page. It doesn't help with the privacy or battery life or security benefits that ad blockers provide, but in terms of just the user experience, at this point at least for me it's far superior to using an ad blocker. So I've been using safari more and more just for this.
Edit: Why am I getting downvoted? I don't think I'm violating any guidelines or saying anything inflammatory here, just curious about other people's experiences using ad blockers.
The downvotes are maybe because you replied to a question of “is xyz still broken?” with “you don’t really need xyz.”
For me it was kind of an annoying place to make that point.
Many people use of ad block really more to protect from the surveillance aspects of ads than their aesthetics. Ads on big sites don’t really look terrible.
I also find generalizations from such unlikely scenarios a bit annoying. You (poster above) have to consistently visit the worst sites on the internet, and so many that whitelisting doesnt suit you, to conclude the adblocking isn’t useful.
If that really describes what you do online, then you need some self-awareness over how little you have in common with everyone else and then temper your epiphanies accordingly.
> Honestly I've been finding ad blockers much less useful over time. Seems like every page I visit these days blocks the content until I disable it, if it's not an outright paywall. I think I spend more time disabling my ad blocker temporarily than I save by not loading ads in the first place.
Good ad blockers have a solution for this. For example, with uBlock Origin you enable an "annoyance" list.
Can you mention some websites that you can't view with uBlock Origin? I haven't seen any and I've been using it for as long as I can remember. Do you also have the Unbreak and Annoyances filter lists enabled?
