There is a lot of confusion around this issue. Some people are taking this to mean that Safari has completely banned ad blockers, which isn't the case. Instead they've switched to a model that matches what they've been doing on iOS which is content blocking[1]. Content blockers give Safari a list of triggers and actions to take when something matches a trigger.
For example; you can have a trigger which contains a regex that matches all images and stylesheets for a given domain. The action can be one of several options, one of which is to block that item.
One advantage this technique provides over ad blocking is that there's no data to be phoned back home. It is, in essence, a mask that is applied to a web page before rendering. Also, it's very lightweight. It's literally just a JSON document which means Safari can perform better.
Now, I'll admit it's not foolproof. Apple and the content blockers have some work to do on it. I'm noticing some issues with it myself after having upgraded to Safari 13. But from a privacy perspective, I personally much prefer this technique.
> One advantage this technique provides over ad blocking is that there's no data to be phoned back home. […] But from a privacy perspective, I personally much prefer this technique.
Are you suggesting uBO is sending data “back home”? It doesn't, and this comment is borderline FUD.
If only everyone used uBlock instead of the countless other scammy adblockers with millions of active users, which do not take privacy nearly as seriously. OP also never mentioned uBlock specifically, so I wouldn't be so quick to call it FUD.
Whether or not this is a sufficient solution is one thing, but there are some legitimate problems with the current state of adblocking. Being able to provide a similar solution in a far more limited fashion would be a good thing for users.
Nah, uBO is fantastic. The problem is nearly all other purported adblockers. Some of them are ok/mediocre; most (like most browser extensions) are just outright crap or malware.
The moral dilemma here seems to be that Google is unwilling to privilege a good-citizen adblocker like uBO over other extensions; they're an ad company and any explicit step towards promoting an adblocker probably is hard to explain at shareholder meetings, even if the engineers want to.
They never suggested anything of the sort. That being said, for every uBO that doesn't send that data back home, there are 1000s of "ad-blockers" that do exactly that.
Browser extensions are executable JS. That is a huge vector for security and privacy issues (you should be extremely selective about which browser extensions you install). This new method is basically a list of regexs that Safari itself runs against the contents of the page. No 3rd party code is executed, so it's not possible for an extension to, for instance, report back on your browsing habits or steal your login credentials.
Browser extensions are becoming a notable security vulnerability, with many high profile extensions falling into the hands of (or being sold to!) bad actors. The arbitrary code execution method of ad blocking (e.g. uBlock) is very flexible but it means that without ongoing comprehensive code review using one puts you at risk if the extension ever changes hands or has a backdoor added.
Apple's method avoids this issue by never letting the extension see the page contents, it only provides match lists of what to block that the browser then enforces. Even if the extension became malicious it has no access to private data on the webpages it is ad blocking on.
What I think they're saying is that with Adblockers, they can phone home which ads they block, URLs they see, etc.
Content blockers impose rules at the outset and the rule generator won't see what the URLs/content actually is.
The way I would think of it would be like "let me see what you're seeing and I'll let you know what to let through" vs "here are a list of things you shouldn't let through but I don't need to know about what the hit rate actually is".
Although I could be misunderstanding the implementation.
This model is also a big performance win. The content blocker rules are compiled to an [efficient byte code format](https://webkit.org/blog/3476/content-blockers-first-look/) which can be evaluated insanely fast (microseconds not milliseconds), compared to doing IPC and running JavaScript for each resource in a page.
Which is same as banning ad blockers. With the declarative API you can't know what domains this website connects to and you can't prevent it from connecting to bad domains. Moreover, trackers and ads can choose a random domain to completely avoid any blacklists.
The content block lists will get updated frequently just like the ad block lists. And, sure, it’s a cat and mouse game just like it is with the add blockers. But at least this way is more performant and secure.
In the end, as has been said by others, if you don’t like it then use Firefox. That’s what’s great about the browser ecosystem we have right now. There are some really great options in browsers.
As a happy Firefox and uBlock Origin user I wonder what is so fundamentally different about uBlock Origin that its filter list can't be converted/translated to the JSON format Safari's content blocking API expects.
OK any argument in favor of this technique shatters in front of the fact that in practice, Ad blocking on iOS is useless, and requires more resources, since some older devices still cant use it.
Apple themselves recommended Ghostery Lite. I feel like that one had some trouble in the past but I can't recall why. Regardless, I installed it and Magic Lasso to see how they do. I used to use Wipr with some success but it appears to be no longer free. Still, if Ghostery Lite and Magic Lasso don't work out, I'll pony up for Wipr.
When Apple says "We're designing this API in a way that allows you to block ads without having full visibility to monitor everything that any user does every web page they visit" it's totally believable because it's in line with the last 10+ years of their product direction.
Yeah, it makes ad blockers less powerful. It also makes them less of an enormous security risk in that all of your web traffic is redirected through them, and a compromised extension could do whatever it wanted with that.
People are more skeptical of Google's motives because nearly all of their money comes from selling ads and for all we know they're more concerned about their very very very large piles of cash than they are about browser extension security. That's not a motivation that Apple would have for their Content Blocker limitations.
No, it's not. Chrome says its for privacy but still allows plugins to snoop on all network traffic (just not midy the requests). So it doesn't improve privacy.
That's why everybody is hating on google - it's a reduction in functionality without an increase of privacy even though that's "why" they did it.
Not "everybody" hates Google for it. People who don't understand the security implications inherent in allowing browser extensions that have nearly-unrestricted access to the user's behavior -- even if well-intended -- may hate the Chrome team for it.
But there are those of us who understand why the Chrome team made the decision it did, and are sympathetic. And we're happy that the Chrome team and Apple are of the same mind about this.
AFAIK, Safari supports longer lists than Chrome to the point that you can produce an usable ad-blocker for Safari but not for Chrome because you will hit the limit too quickly.
It's also good for performance. The blocking can happen immediately in the browser/network process, instead of waiting for the extension code to run in its own process and tell the network service what to do.
The situation with Chrome is actually even more misconstrued than that, since ad-blocking performance isn't the only, or even the most important, issue Chromium is dealing with in Manifest v3. Chrome extension security has become one of the biggest time sucks in corpsec/IT security, and that team had been planning for years to address it. But people have a rooting interest in uBO, so none of that gets out.
Like many things in technology, there are few write ups explaining this, including the pros and cons, in simple terms that most people can understand. So, people are not well informed.
When they are not well informed they will tend to make decisions based on other things, like their business model. We know that Google makes money displaying ads and has generally soaked up information on people to use for their benefit. Apple has been advocating privacy and makes money selling hardware and services.
If there was an "explain it to me like I'm 5" write up on how the changes to Safari and proposed changes to Chrome would work I could imagine it would help people see something other than the business model.
This isn't a double standard. It's people making judgements on something other than the technology.
Chrome was going to allow only a very small list - that's what people were complaining about. The idea of having a built-in way to specify blocks is fine, it's more efficient anyway.
Well i have no complains about Safari but their Extension system is really costing them users. At this point I uBlock Origin is by far the most reliable AdBlocker you can find and my having the developers explaining that in the future maybe only Firefox will support it it's kinda of sad.
Of course we know that Google has to make money from Ads so its understandable but what about Apple ? They are putting heavy focus in privacy, would it be good if they open their browser to make sure their users will not move to Chrome/Firefox or other browser ?
The day ublock origin doesn't work on chrome is the day users will flock to firefox. We have seen time and time again that users aren't afraid of switching browsers. This is because since their core functionality is so similar, small advantages will tip the scales.
This was true during an intermediate period where all browsers were more-or-less equivalent. It wasn't true before then, when many sites were designed with Internet Explorer in mind, and tended to work less well on other browsers. I don't think it will be true now, either, now that most sites are designed with Chrome in mind, and tend to work less well on other browsers.
The big difference is that the functionality problems 20 years ago were easier to explain, and therefore easier to get people upset about. It's a lot easier to weave a compelling political story about straight-up incompatibility than it is to weave one about degraded performance due to differing just-in-time compiler optimization behavior.
Also, we seem to be stuck in a situation where people are still so fixated on a monarch that hasn't been in power for over a decade that they maybe haven't been so concerned that the old monarch's overthrower has consolidated power to become a new monarch.
As a chrome-user: this. Firefox lost me years ago due to performance differences, and since chrome works fine for me, there was no ux-related reason to switch back. The day I'll see ads everywhere will be the day I'm back to firefox, and without second thoughts at that. If I really like your service, I'll happily pay for it. I hate ads, the psychological strats behind them are completely unacceptable. I'd happily pay google a subscription-rate, if that's what it takes tbh. Take my money, not my attention.
>The day ublock origin doesn't work on chrome is the day users will flock to firefox.
>This is because since their core functionality is so similar, small advantages will tip the scales.
It is a a bold assertion, which is not backed up by the data. Despite Mozilla repositioning Firefox recently and reclaiming some lost ground, it is to a larger extent, still only maintaining a steady set of core users. To make an assumption that small advantages will tip the scales in favour of FF is wishful thinking, as demonstrated by some of the conversations. Furthermore, it is inherently not in the best interests of Google to actively promote ad-blocking policy unless it serves it's own purpose, coupled with the acute awareness of why power users and developers pick Chrome ─ they are well positioned to throttle any competition.
You say that (and I agree - I use Firefox everywhere because there's no Chrome plugin support on Android) but I'm genuinely curious to see what happens if/when Chrome stops supporting ublock origin. I suspect - sadly - that there won't be the "flocking to firefox" we might be hoping for. Just enough ads will get blocked with a new, gimped ublock origin, or built-in ad blocking of some flavour, to prevent any meaningful exodus.
Exactly, especially for people who don't do web development the difference is hardly there. Actually I recently started to prefer Safari, despite its less smoother Tab UX but this was enough reason to make me switch to Firefox (Nightly). I'm also surprised that it seems to start faster than Safari.
>I must admit the the terminology isn't very clear. A Safari "content-blocker" app sends a list to Safari, and Safari blocks it. A regular blocker (like uBO) blocks content itself. Safari content blockers aren't all bad, they are more secure in that they can't possibly collect your browsing history (not that uBO does), but lack the level of customisation and power that a regular blocker like uBO can provide.
It's nice that random extensions can't peek at your browsing history, but on the other hand, you have to trust that Apple won't decide to ignore any block rules. What if one day they make a deal with Disney and now all Disney ads are on the permanent do-not-block list?
" they are more secure in that they can't possibly collect your browsing history (not that uBO does), but lack the level of customisation and power that a regular blocker like uBO can provide."
Why would Apple care if Mac users used a none Safari browser? Apple doesn’t lose a penny from users switching browsers. As far as iOS, no matter which “browser” you use, you’re still using WebKit.
>Why would Apple care if Mac users used a [non-]Safari browser?
Apple doesn't care individually what users use. However, Apple (and everyone else for that matter) does have reason to be concerned about Google's Chrome completely dominating the web in the way IE once did. iOS is certainly their biggest bulwark, but that doesn't mean they'd be delighted if Mac users felt required to use Chrome. Further, they also have made being able to avoid the anti-privacy ad-driven ecosystem to some extent an important differentiating factor. Even with Firefox existing, having a purely Mac focused and maximally optimized browser (FF is only barely catching up this/next version on basic power efficiency for example) that has strong privacy protections with no conflicts of interest is a sales point.
That doesn't mean it's a total core focus of course, but neither is there no pressure at all.
I thought Apple were way out in front when it came to tracking and whatnot...
My wife uses a MAC at home and was complaining about how slow our internet was (70Mb down... not slow) a while back.
She mainly looks at news sites and when I saw what she was looking at I knew the problem wasn't the internet connection.
The entire page, apart from a tiny bit in the middle, was cluttered with moving shit!
I installed uBlock Origin and... the result was fantastic: pages loaded in a fraction of the time.
When she realised that the articles were a tiny proportion of the downloaded crap she realised she'd been missing out for so long.
Once, when the MAC went back for repair, it was replaced with a new one and OMG the horror when she fired up Safari and it had no blocker... UBlock Origin to the rescue.
I agree with one of the other comments on here: The web is utterly unusable without it.
Apple is trying to thread the needle. They want to allow content blocking, but they do not want to allow content blocking plugins to see and potentially report on what sites you visit.
Personally, I’m totally cool with the trade-off of having less capable ad blocking functionality, if I can be sure my web plugins aren’t a security or privacy risk.
It's a very popular project on GitHub with many developers scrutinizing any changes to the codebase. Fears of uBlock Origin being a "security or privacy risk" based on code in the extension are unfounded.
I don’t see why Safari can’t block extensions from sending data to remote servers. Seems like a pretty basic thing, so we have more powerful tools and not the privacy risks
Count me as another one who really doesn't understand how others can stand the unfiltered "Modern Web", although I use a combination of JS whitelisting, HOSTS file, and a filtering proxy, so I might be on the extreme end.
I've had to help others, whose computers did not have such blocking software (and they might not want to), and had to physically put my hand over parts of pages "cluttered with moving shit" in order that it would not distract me and allow focusing on the content itself. These people are also the ones who tend to miss details in instructions and seem to blindly ignore things like (actually important) notifications and warning messages, which leads me to wonder if their natural state of mind while reading pages is so distracted that they have trouble focusing.
It’s not like Safari is blocking all ad blockers like Google Chrome did... its more of deprecating & removing APIs that can be abused to track users browsing history by disguising itself into a browser extension.
Safari provides an alternative API that allows content blocking, that IMHO is better considering that
* it doesn’t allow leaking browsing history
* it runs in native code (not js like alternative ad blockers) so much fast
In a way, Apple is doing this to protect user privacy.
Can you even begin to imagine how much of the Internet's total bandwidth is used on adware/shovelware/crapware? And crazier still, how much of the world finds most of the web completely unusable as a result?
Imagine trying to browse modern web pages on a dial-up speed connection. Many sites now completely refuse to load until you load their JS, which calls some external JS, which then renders the page. I run almost every web page without JS and Cloudflare is the number 1 reason for not being able to access a page.
I remember a while ago I had to use the internet on my girlfriend’s laptop. I have been using adblockers for a long time and I had no idea how bad the internet really is. All the ads and other stuff are unbearable to me.
Apple isn't ending ad blockers. They're ending the specific API that uBlock Origin uses. For instance, I use 1Blocker on Mac and iOS and it does a great job of blocking ads using the still-supported APIs.
It's interesting that Google and Apple seem to be converging on this issue (ad-blocking extensions) even though they're probably coming from two different directions.
Google probably wants to discourage ad-blocking because it's a threat to their business model. Apple just dislikes not having full control on what the users run (and sometimes for good reasons, they probably want to avoid malware extensions). Still, in the end they both end up with subpar ad blocking facilities as a result.
Firefox really needs to become a worthy competitor once again. And no I don't consider forks of Chromium to be reasonable alternatives in the long term, at least until those teams prove that they can maintain a deep fork of the browser on their own which will be necessary if they need to maintain functionality that Google removes from upstream.
> Firefox really needs to become a worthy competitor once again.
For me it's always been, I've used Firefox without pause since it was called Phoenix. I know there was a small exodus to Chrome when it had better parallelization, but as far as I know Firefox is leading on that front again.
So what do you mean by "worthy"? Higher market share or some missing features? I'm obviously biased as I never left for competition but I don't have any complaints, neither on desktop nor with the Android version.
Same here. Crazy to think that I've been using it for over 15 years and never had a reason to change. I've tried other browsers, but none of them gave me a compelling reason to continue with them.
I think the most probable reason for that has been the complete support for addons that no other browser ever did. For instance, why doesn't Chrome have support for vertical/tree-style tabs without using a separate window? That one feature alone keeps me on firefox. By removing the tab bar at the top of the screen, you regain a significant amount of vertical space on a laptop.
>
So what do you mean by "worthy"? Higher market share or some missing features? I'm obviously biased as I never left for competition but I don't have any complaints, neither on desktop nor with the Android version.
On Windows or Linux, IMO there is no competitive advantage on Chrome vs Firefox; However on macOS, Safari has a very big competitive advantage that Apple has done lots of integrations to macOS; it’s not just something like IE where Microsoft used private APIs to be the default browser; but that macOS users tends to have a big bias on native apps developed with the Cocoa API, with a native looking interface.
Both Chrome & Firefox is a cross platform browser that really doesn’t really care whether the macOS version is integrated well, hence having a very outstanding look compared to other apps.
Honestly, the thing that makes me go back to Safari every time is the interface. And this is coming from someone who used to speak about Firefox in open-source events like Latinoware.
While Safari feels like home, Firefox looks horrible — seriously, what is up with that border-top-color on each tab? And the black border around white icons on the light theme?
Yes, you can fix anything using userChrome.css — heck, you can make it look exactly like Safari —, but each update breaks some pieces of your CSS file, which after a while becomes quite annoying.
>So what do you mean by "worthy"? Higher market share or some missing features?
The former, I also use Firefox as my main browser (and have been doing so for a long time). I worry that it may not survive in the long run if its market share remains so low.
That being said the latter might also be true for Mac users as apparently it suffers from performance issues (it's even mentioned in the Github issue linked). Fortunately it seems that it's going to be fixed in the not-so-far future.
I was one of those users that switched to Chrome for a while (5-6 years, probably). I've now switched back to Firefox. My only frustration is that some sites don't work as well (or, occasionally, at all) on Firefox as they do on Chrome. Not surprisingly, Google's own sites are often the worse culprits.
I've used alternative sites when necessary, though. Bing Maps is actually fairly decent.
I think Apple may still be acting with privacy in mind, as opposed to being controlling. Extensions do pose a risk to users when they become popular enough, and there have been examples in Chrome where an ad company buys an extension and embeds tracking into it, or otherwise encourages the author to embed ads.
It doesn't invalidate the other motivation for wanting extensions to be published in the app store, of course, but I think the privacy use-case is sound.
You don't think Firefox is a worthy competitor at the moment? I've used it quite happily in the last few years, but would be interested in what you think its shortcomings are. I know there is supposed to be a power drain issue, but I haven't noticed that personally. Apart from that, I'm not aware of any major issues.
Firefox preexists Chrome by like, six years (2002, 2008).
Firefox stems from Mozilla (1998) stems from Netscape Navigator (1994, originally).
Chrome stems from Blink stems from Webkit (Apple's thing, 2001ish) stems from KHTML (KDE, 1998).
Amusingly, all the historical parts of the Chrome stack are basically still around. You can install recent versions of Safari and use Webkit, or install recent versions of Konqueror and browse the web with KHTML (although development has lagged since 2016).
I like using Safari and uBlock Origin. I notice that I am not a power user of browsers - give tabs, a forward and backward button and any adblocker and I used to be happy. This mean that I could easily use Safari and Firefox - I prefer not to use Chrome derivatives to do my part in preventing developers from forgetting about other browsers.
However, I have recently become a power user of uBlock Origin specifically to curtail the general attention hacking on the web. uBlock Origin is already a very great ad blocker in its default installation, but I've recently got into using its powerful cosmetic filters to block out "attention hacking features", such as (all of) YouTube's recommendations, comments on various sites, and stuff like the "Hot Network Questions" on StackOverflow. Things I've discovered that are too good at distracting my mind. With a few uBlock Origin cosmetic filter rules, those website elements remain hidden when I visit them.
I wonder if it's possible to continue using Safari with my own distraction filters. It's a shame if I have to stop using it.
I really like the idea of using uBlock Origin to block distractions. I've used it quite a bit to block minor annoying website features like sticky menus or marketing popups. I might start using it more extensively to block actual content.
Have you tried the content blockers? They work fine for me on Safari (kablock or wipr) and mobile Safari (adblock plus and kiyoshi, the latter against custom fonts) and I’m highly allergic to the usual adserver ads.
The balance for me is Privacy Badger. As well as first party ads, I whitelist DoubleClick and Facebook (but don't allow them to set tracking cookies). I don't mind ads and want a sustainable internet, but on my terms. Performance seems to be much better now.
I use 1Blocker, I don't see any ads, and I appreciate the improvement in battery life compared to Chrome. Maybe uBO is better by some metric, but for me 1Blocker is certainly good enough.
Sadly, despite the downvoting and "I am! And so is my wife!" replies, you're essentially statistically correct. The number of "firefox for android" users (and I'm one of them) is just a yawn and an ironic smile between Google execs in any "shall we allow plugins on Chrome for Android to compete with Firefox" discussion if indeed it ever even gets mentioned.
I use a blocker too, but the problem is if everyone starts blocking ads then the current free internet cannot be sustained as it is today. We'll have to move to a paid model, which won't be cheap if you choose to visit many sites, like today, and also the clearing entity will know about what sites you browse. It can't be anonymous, because in case of a dispute it has to be known who paid for what.
> but the problem is if everyone starts blocking ads then the current free internet cannot be sustained as it is today
No, it's a myth, the web doesn't work like that. There are many millions of websites, but only some thousands can actually make enough on ads to sustain themselves. And most of them can survive if everyone starts blocking ads. It's online advertising companies and adtech industry that are going to fold if everyone starts blocking ads, not anyone else.
> if everyone starts blocking ads then the current free internet cannot be sustained as it is today
True, but you could also say same about state of advertisement on TV. I think this problem is quite far away, as most people don't use them. Also major players are/will be actively throwing obstacles for average Joe to install ad blocker.
Also consider impact of platforms like patreon, et al. A lot of small time one-person content creators are being supported mainly by it. So there are quite few people who are willing to support quality stuff (disproving idea that people are trained to get everything on the internet for free and ads are only way to make living).
Using anonymity as an argument for the ad-based model is fairly ironic given that a vast majority of the tracking taking place today is specifically to spam with with "targeted" ads.
Beyond that I have no issue with websites having to move away from ads and towards a paid model instead. I actually welcome it. I want to be the client, not the product. I want more websites to offer me the possibility to pay for an ad-less experience.
I don't care. If the web becomes largely paywalled as a result I'll just stop visiting those sites and stick to the still free ones. Or there's other things to do with one's time, if you cast your mind back 10 or so years before everyone became glued to their phones.
A while ago I uninstalled uBO/PrivacyBadger and switched to using a combination of NextDNS [0] and Brave for daily driving (Firefox for work because FF containers) and the adblocking + browsing experience has been nothing short of stellar.
NextDNS takes the load off outside the network perimeter and concatenates all the many lists and trackers in one dashboard. I'm free to use other gentler add-ons in the browser if I so desire, rather than have the DOM split apart and my local machine do all the heavy lifting.
The best thing about using DNS-level blocking is that it's an elegant solution across all my devices, especially when paired with a VPN that enforces those resolvers.
Where that fails though is exceptions. Do you want to block ads, but follow that one link you're really interested in? Sorry, it redirects via a doubleclick site and you can't allow just that one entry. You also need to leave your browser environment to find and unblock it.
You can't, for example, block all Twitter/Youtube requests on third-party pages, but allow them on first-party pages. Firefox containers help a little bit with this, but only for cookies/session data -- not for blocking scripts outright.
That irritated me once or twice at first, after setting PiHole to implement DNS based ad blocking at the network level.
It hasn't bothered me long term though. If that happens and I care enough about what made me follow the link then a quick search has always brought up another route to that content or equivalent content.
Often I don't care even that much in which case I click the back button or close the tab and get on with something else. In fact this "problem" might be saving me wasted time that I can use/waste elsewhere. It might even be saving money by reducing impulse purchases, if the links are ones I've followed to see what the sales pitch is for a product/service that has been mentioned in an article!
I actually come across that use case ever so often. My solution is to right-click the link in Brave and choose "Open link in private window with Tor" and it loads without any issue; since the exit node performs the DNS resolution.
The worst thing about DNS based filtering is that it can’t block same domain based ads. For example, YouTube servers ads on the same domain, which totally makes DNS based blocking useless. I moved on to Safari content blockers for this reason, from the hosts file based ad blocking.
However, if you're just trying to setup NextDNS you can signup for free on their website and within the account dashboard you'll find instructions for configuring your desktop and mobile OS, DoH in Firefox, router, etc. (screenshots of what this dashboard looks like are in the blog post if you're curious).
This isn’t just about applying some regexes, it’s about disabling utterly obnoxious “features” of web sites.
Until a content blocker can offer a right-click “block THIS element” feature, they won’t come close to the power of uBO. The UI alone for highlighting the exact offender in the document tree is brilliant. Every time a “newsletter” pops in my face, I can banish it forever. Every unnecessary floating space-stealing navigation bar, I can banish, returning the screen space that was stolen from me. Every scroll-with-the-article Facebook/Twitter gadget can be similarly removed.
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For example; you can have a trigger which contains a regex that matches all images and stylesheets for a given domain. The action can be one of several options, one of which is to block that item.
One advantage this technique provides over ad blocking is that there's no data to be phoned back home. It is, in essence, a mask that is applied to a web page before rendering. Also, it's very lightweight. It's literally just a JSON document which means Safari can perform better.
Now, I'll admit it's not foolproof. Apple and the content blockers have some work to do on it. I'm noticing some issues with it myself after having upgraded to Safari 13. But from a privacy perspective, I personally much prefer this technique.
1: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/cre...
Are you suggesting uBO is sending data “back home”? It doesn't, and this comment is borderline FUD.
Whether or not this is a sufficient solution is one thing, but there are some legitimate problems with the current state of adblocking. Being able to provide a similar solution in a far more limited fashion would be a good thing for users.
The moral dilemma here seems to be that Google is unwilling to privilege a good-citizen adblocker like uBO over other extensions; they're an ad company and any explicit step towards promoting an adblocker probably is hard to explain at shareholder meetings, even if the engineers want to.
Apple's method avoids this issue by never letting the extension see the page contents, it only provides match lists of what to block that the browser then enforces. Even if the extension became malicious it has no access to private data on the webpages it is ad blocking on.
Content blockers impose rules at the outset and the rule generator won't see what the URLs/content actually is.
The way I would think of it would be like "let me see what you're seeing and I'll let you know what to let through" vs "here are a list of things you shouldn't let through but I don't need to know about what the hit rate actually is".
Although I could be misunderstanding the implementation.
In the end, as has been said by others, if you don’t like it then use Firefox. That’s what’s great about the browser ecosystem we have right now. There are some really great options in browsers.
Is it more difficult than I imagine?
I certainly would. I had been using Safari on mac only because it was fine and I had no need to switch to firefox or chrome.
Now I will definitely not be using safari anymore.
Yeah, it makes ad blockers less powerful. It also makes them less of an enormous security risk in that all of your web traffic is redirected through them, and a compromised extension could do whatever it wanted with that.
People are more skeptical of Google's motives because nearly all of their money comes from selling ads and for all we know they're more concerned about their very very very large piles of cash than they are about browser extension security. That's not a motivation that Apple would have for their Content Blocker limitations.
That's why everybody is hating on google - it's a reduction in functionality without an increase of privacy even though that's "why" they did it.
But there are those of us who understand why the Chrome team made the decision it did, and are sympathetic. And we're happy that the Chrome team and Apple are of the same mind about this.
Look no further for why our society is having such trouble coming to any sort of agreement on issues that matter.
I read the GitHub post yesterday, immediately bought 1Blocker, and moved on! (And it's been great!)
Like many things in technology, there are few write ups explaining this, including the pros and cons, in simple terms that most people can understand. So, people are not well informed.
When they are not well informed they will tend to make decisions based on other things, like their business model. We know that Google makes money displaying ads and has generally soaked up information on people to use for their benefit. Apple has been advocating privacy and makes money selling hardware and services.
If there was an "explain it to me like I'm 5" write up on how the changes to Safari and proposed changes to Chrome would work I could imagine it would help people see something other than the business model.
This isn't a double standard. It's people making judgements on something other than the technology.
A double standard requires the same person or population to hold logically contradictory viewpoints. That isn't what is happening here.
Of course you’ll hear a lot more noise from the users of the browser with the larger share by a wide margin.
Of course we know that Google has to make money from Ads so its understandable but what about Apple ? They are putting heavy focus in privacy, would it be good if they open their browser to make sure their users will not move to Chrome/Firefox or other browser ?
The manifest v3 proposal takes chrome down to roughly the same level as Safari for ad blocking plugins. https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#iss...
So, that day isn't far off. It was supposed to be in canary last month, I haven't checked.
The big difference is that the functionality problems 20 years ago were easier to explain, and therefore easier to get people upset about. It's a lot easier to weave a compelling political story about straight-up incompatibility than it is to weave one about degraded performance due to differing just-in-time compiler optimization behavior.
Also, we seem to be stuck in a situation where people are still so fixated on a monarch that hasn't been in power for over a decade that they maybe haven't been so concerned that the old monarch's overthrower has consolidated power to become a new monarch.
>This is because since their core functionality is so similar, small advantages will tip the scales.
It is a a bold assertion, which is not backed up by the data. Despite Mozilla repositioning Firefox recently and reclaiming some lost ground, it is to a larger extent, still only maintaining a steady set of core users. To make an assumption that small advantages will tip the scales in favour of FF is wishful thinking, as demonstrated by some of the conversations. Furthermore, it is inherently not in the best interests of Google to actively promote ad-blocking policy unless it serves it's own purpose, coupled with the acute awareness of why power users and developers pick Chrome ─ they are well positioned to throttle any competition.
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20850135
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20052623
https://twitter.com/brave/status/1088914000379731970
See the difference here: https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158#issuecommen...
I'd give Apple's claim here as much credence as I give Google's claim that webRequest caused performance problems when extensions used it.
It's nice that random extensions can't peek at your browsing history, but on the other hand, you have to trust that Apple won't decide to ignore any block rules. What if one day they make a deal with Disney and now all Disney ads are on the permanent do-not-block list?
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Quite the spin to make a negative a positive.
"Privacy" is the new buzzword.
Apple doesn't care individually what users use. However, Apple (and everyone else for that matter) does have reason to be concerned about Google's Chrome completely dominating the web in the way IE once did. iOS is certainly their biggest bulwark, but that doesn't mean they'd be delighted if Mac users felt required to use Chrome. Further, they also have made being able to avoid the anti-privacy ad-driven ecosystem to some extent an important differentiating factor. Even with Firefox existing, having a purely Mac focused and maximally optimized browser (FF is only barely catching up this/next version on basic power efficiency for example) that has strong privacy protections with no conflicts of interest is a sales point.
That doesn't mean it's a total core focus of course, but neither is there no pressure at all.
Dead Comment
I thought Apple were way out in front when it came to tracking and whatnot...
My wife uses a MAC at home and was complaining about how slow our internet was (70Mb down... not slow) a while back.
She mainly looks at news sites and when I saw what she was looking at I knew the problem wasn't the internet connection.
The entire page, apart from a tiny bit in the middle, was cluttered with moving shit!
I installed uBlock Origin and... the result was fantastic: pages loaded in a fraction of the time.
When she realised that the articles were a tiny proportion of the downloaded crap she realised she'd been missing out for so long.
Once, when the MAC went back for repair, it was replaced with a new one and OMG the horror when she fired up Safari and it had no blocker... UBlock Origin to the rescue.
I agree with one of the other comments on here: The web is utterly unusable without it.
Personally, I’m totally cool with the trade-off of having less capable ad blocking functionality, if I can be sure my web plugins aren’t a security or privacy risk.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/
It's a very popular project on GitHub with many developers scrutinizing any changes to the codebase. Fears of uBlock Origin being a "security or privacy risk" based on code in the extension are unfounded.
I've had to help others, whose computers did not have such blocking software (and they might not want to), and had to physically put my hand over parts of pages "cluttered with moving shit" in order that it would not distract me and allow focusing on the content itself. These people are also the ones who tend to miss details in instructions and seem to blindly ignore things like (actually important) notifications and warning messages, which leads me to wonder if their natural state of mind while reading pages is so distracted that they have trouble focusing.
* it doesn’t allow leaking browsing history
* it runs in native code (not js like alternative ad blockers) so much fast
In a way, Apple is doing this to protect user privacy.
Imagine trying to browse modern web pages on a dial-up speed connection. Many sites now completely refuse to load until you load their JS, which calls some external JS, which then renders the page. I run almost every web page without JS and Cloudflare is the number 1 reason for not being able to access a page.
Google probably wants to discourage ad-blocking because it's a threat to their business model. Apple just dislikes not having full control on what the users run (and sometimes for good reasons, they probably want to avoid malware extensions). Still, in the end they both end up with subpar ad blocking facilities as a result.
Firefox really needs to become a worthy competitor once again. And no I don't consider forks of Chromium to be reasonable alternatives in the long term, at least until those teams prove that they can maintain a deep fork of the browser on their own which will be necessary if they need to maintain functionality that Google removes from upstream.
For me it's always been, I've used Firefox without pause since it was called Phoenix. I know there was a small exodus to Chrome when it had better parallelization, but as far as I know Firefox is leading on that front again.
So what do you mean by "worthy"? Higher market share or some missing features? I'm obviously biased as I never left for competition but I don't have any complaints, neither on desktop nor with the Android version.
I think the most probable reason for that has been the complete support for addons that no other browser ever did. For instance, why doesn't Chrome have support for vertical/tree-style tabs without using a separate window? That one feature alone keeps me on firefox. By removing the tab bar at the top of the screen, you regain a significant amount of vertical space on a laptop.
On Windows or Linux, IMO there is no competitive advantage on Chrome vs Firefox; However on macOS, Safari has a very big competitive advantage that Apple has done lots of integrations to macOS; it’s not just something like IE where Microsoft used private APIs to be the default browser; but that macOS users tends to have a big bias on native apps developed with the Cocoa API, with a native looking interface. Both Chrome & Firefox is a cross platform browser that really doesn’t really care whether the macOS version is integrated well, hence having a very outstanding look compared to other apps.
While Safari feels like home, Firefox looks horrible — seriously, what is up with that border-top-color on each tab? And the black border around white icons on the light theme?
Yes, you can fix anything using userChrome.css — heck, you can make it look exactly like Safari —, but each update breaks some pieces of your CSS file, which after a while becomes quite annoying.
The former, I also use Firefox as my main browser (and have been doing so for a long time). I worry that it may not survive in the long run if its market share remains so low.
That being said the latter might also be true for Mac users as apparently it suffers from performance issues (it's even mentioned in the Github issue linked). Fortunately it seems that it's going to be fixed in the not-so-far future.
I've used alternative sites when necessary, though. Bing Maps is actually fairly decent.
It doesn't invalidate the other motivation for wanting extensions to be published in the app store, of course, but I think the privacy use-case is sound.
Firefox stems from Mozilla (1998) stems from Netscape Navigator (1994, originally).
Chrome stems from Blink stems from Webkit (Apple's thing, 2001ish) stems from KHTML (KDE, 1998).
Amusingly, all the historical parts of the Chrome stack are basically still around. You can install recent versions of Safari and use Webkit, or install recent versions of Konqueror and browse the web with KHTML (although development has lagged since 2016).
However, I have recently become a power user of uBlock Origin specifically to curtail the general attention hacking on the web. uBlock Origin is already a very great ad blocker in its default installation, but I've recently got into using its powerful cosmetic filters to block out "attention hacking features", such as (all of) YouTube's recommendations, comments on various sites, and stuff like the "Hot Network Questions" on StackOverflow. Things I've discovered that are too good at distracting my mind. With a few uBlock Origin cosmetic filter rules, those website elements remain hidden when I visit them.
I wonder if it's possible to continue using Safari with my own distraction filters. It's a shame if I have to stop using it.
You can, and I’m working on making this. (No timeline, since I’m notoriously bad at getting things out the door.)
[1]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax
Otherwise I'd be stuck in apps that have at least some vested interest in keeping ads reasonable.
I still use Firefox with uBO and enjoy being able to hide all those annoying headers, footers and overlays.
No, it's a myth, the web doesn't work like that. There are many millions of websites, but only some thousands can actually make enough on ads to sustain themselves. And most of them can survive if everyone starts blocking ads. It's online advertising companies and adtech industry that are going to fold if everyone starts blocking ads, not anyone else.
The internet will be fine without ads and tracking.
Sites are free to block me if they want... plenty of other sites I can go to.
True, but you could also say same about state of advertisement on TV. I think this problem is quite far away, as most people don't use them. Also major players are/will be actively throwing obstacles for average Joe to install ad blocker.
Also consider impact of platforms like patreon, et al. A lot of small time one-person content creators are being supported mainly by it. So there are quite few people who are willing to support quality stuff (disproving idea that people are trained to get everything on the internet for free and ads are only way to make living).
Which would be a good thing.
Beyond that I have no issue with websites having to move away from ads and towards a paid model instead. I actually welcome it. I want to be the client, not the product. I want more websites to offer me the possibility to pay for an ad-less experience.
Idem with ads.
NextDNS takes the load off outside the network perimeter and concatenates all the many lists and trackers in one dashboard. I'm free to use other gentler add-ons in the browser if I so desire, rather than have the DOM split apart and my local machine do all the heavy lifting.
The best thing about using DNS-level blocking is that it's an elegant solution across all my devices, especially when paired with a VPN that enforces those resolvers.
[0] https://nextdns.io
You can't, for example, block all Twitter/Youtube requests on third-party pages, but allow them on first-party pages. Firefox containers help a little bit with this, but only for cookies/session data -- not for blocking scripts outright.
It hasn't bothered me long term though. If that happens and I care enough about what made me follow the link then a quick search has always brought up another route to that content or equivalent content.
Often I don't care even that much in which case I click the back button or close the tab and get on with something else. In fact this "problem" might be saving me wasted time that I can use/waste elsewhere. It might even be saving money by reducing impulse purchases, if the links are ones I've followed to see what the sales pitch is for a product/service that has been mentioned in an article!
However, if you're just trying to setup NextDNS you can signup for free on their website and within the account dashboard you'll find instructions for configuring your desktop and mobile OS, DoH in Firefox, router, etc. (screenshots of what this dashboard looks like are in the blog post if you're curious).
Until a content blocker can offer a right-click “block THIS element” feature, they won’t come close to the power of uBO. The UI alone for highlighting the exact offender in the document tree is brilliant. Every time a “newsletter” pops in my face, I can banish it forever. Every unnecessary floating space-stealing navigation bar, I can banish, returning the screen space that was stolen from me. Every scroll-with-the-article Facebook/Twitter gadget can be similarly removed.