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Comment by wyclif | Hacker News Reader

This past weekend I tried Safari again when I saw it updated to version 12. I was surprised to see that Apple deactivated my uBlock Origin plugin, saying it would slow the browser down. So now Safari is unusable and filled with ads, and there's nothing Apple provides to replace uBlock Origin. This is a total show-stopper for me.

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It’s really just a suggestion to turn off some extensions. Haven’t bothered to figure out what triggers Safari to do that, but you can still run uBlock Origin on Safari 12 and it seems to work fine.

> Haven’t bothered to figure out what triggers Safari to do that

Safari has a new extensions model and will be deprecating the legacy one in a year. Hence the push to migrate to newer extensions.

the new extensions model is ridiculously useless... You need to build your extension in Xcode now, and for anything other than content blocking, the APIs are non existent... for instance, you can't even close tabs!

I made an extremely simple extension using the new model around 2months - before I try migrating an older "actually useful" extension. But theres just no way its possible to migrate.

Apple doesn't care about browser extensions now, it seems they want everyone to move to the new model, so they can collect revenue on sales on ad blockers.

This is wrong - you can inject arbitrary scripts and styles:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/saf...

You didn’t reply to or contradict anything they said. You need Xcode to build extensions and Safari has a super limited API. Executing JS and CSS don’t address either.

He didn’t say limited, he said nonexistent.

More specifically, if you can inject scripts I don’t see why you couldn’t call window.close()

> Apple doesn't care about browser extensions now, it seems they want everyone to move to the new model, so they can collect revenue on sales on ad blockers.

The web is terrible without a serious adblocker and the available alternatives (paid or not) are unable to take away the same amount of junk. People will simply start using another browser.

Apple doesn't provide a replacement extension, but they do vend a replacement API, the content blocking API. There are many extensions that use this.

You can turn it back on. Go to Preferences -> Extensions and check "uBlock Origin". I've been using Safari 12 since it came out and uBlock Origin works with it just fine.

You can get the Adblock Plus app, which using the new API.

This is a tradeoff Apple made valuing privacy and performance over user freedom. The new content blocking API is safer and faster.

I haven't tried uBlock Origin, but I'm running 1Blocker and Ka-Block! and they filter out most of the worst offenders.

You might be thankful it was deactivated - it might have not been legit.

https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/69

I just use uBlock Origin anyway (basically ignore the message). I don't see a difference in performance with the plugin when I updated to v12 on my mid-2010 MBP (it's slow anyway, so /shrug).

Don’t use uBlock, but content blockers on Safari work really well for me. There is also quite a lot of built in privacy protection already.

same happened with Adguard and this was using non deprecated APIs (uBlock Origin was and is clearly using deprecated APIs). It seems for blocking stuff Apple changed the whole SDK on the browser!

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