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Comment by Geee | Hacker News Reader

I recently switched to Safari on Mac. Safari has a native content blocking mechanism (on Mac and iPhone) which works quite well without giving the extension open access to the page content. It works simply by a JSON file that describes the blocking rules, and doesn't require running any third-party code on the web page.

So far, I've not missed any features of Chrome except opening accidentally closed tab again. You might want to change few settings though: "show full urls" and "show favicons".

Apple Pay also works remarkably well, just click "Pay with Apple", and the authentication request pops up on your iPhone, requesting Touch ID / Face ID.

I've not seen anyone implement the new "Sign in with Apple", which automatically generates burner email addresses, but that's another reason to switch to Safari.

Also, one feature which I like is the automatic generation of strong passwords.

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For the record, Chrome is switching to the same content blocking mechanism (declarative blocking) as Safari is currently using.

I do personally think this lends some plausibility to Google's assertions that they're doing it for performance reasons rather than to make adblockers worse. It's not like Apple's doing it for the ad revenue.

Safari’s blocking isn’t limited to a small number of blocks like Chrome’s

> I do personally think this lends some plausibility to Google's assertions that they're doing it for performance reasons rather than to make adblockers worse.

I don’t know that I buy this.

Chrome has a bunch of restrictions that Safari doesn’t, which make ad-blocking in particular impractical.

Safari has, iirc, a hard 100,000 rule limit per blocker rule list. 1Blocker splits itself into 7 such lists to have enough room for all of the rules needed to be effective.

Chrome has a hard global limit of 150,000 across all extensions. Multiple adblock authors have indicated that’s probably too tight.

Safari also lets content blockers reconfigure rules on the fly, so I can add a rule or make an exception for a site as I browse as a user.

Chrome requires the lists to be totally static and pre-approved by reviewers. Change a rule requires resubmitting the extension for reapproval.

All-in-all it looks to me like Chrome’s changes are designed to look like what Safari does on the surface, while actually adding onerous new conditions that effectively cripple the effectiveness and usefulness of adblockers.

uBlock doesnt only block. It:

    shims/redirects some known trackers for their benign versions

    rewrites incoming resource on the fly

    injects custom javascript

    injects/modifies CSS on the fly

Neither Safari, nor manifest v3 allow that.

> uBlock doesnt only block. It:

> shims/redirects some known trackers for their benign versions

Well, all content blockers for Safari that I have used block trackers.

> rewrites incoming resource on the fly

Pure interest, may I ask why it's needed?

> injects custom javascript

> injects/modifies CSS on the fly

AFAIK injecting custom JS & CSS is available for Safari extensions, it's just that Safari Content blockers don't have them. (So that you can just only use content blockers, or you can opt-in to enable the ones that also inject JS. 1Blocker uses injected JS/CSS to add custom rules by pointing to DOM elements in-browser.) And that's a good thing(TM) IMO, so that non-technical users can't get faked by malicious extensions that injects malicious scripts.

Safari still doesn't display favicons on the Favorites bar, which is really annoying.

What do you mean about the closed tab? Just click cmd-shift-t.

It seems I just didn't look for it in the right place. Thanks.

It used to be Cmd-Z, interestingly. I kind of liked that. Haven’t tried in a while, has it changed to be in line with other browsers now?

Both works. I personally prefer Cmd-Z, as it feels like a natural choice, but Cmd-Shift-T also works when I'm editing a text field like when I'm writing a comment now.

I really like Safari. Underrated browser. Unfortunately it lacks one feature that _to me_ is a dealbreaker: a way to have multiple identities/profiles.

Opening the same page in different private tabs accomplishes this. Private tabs are completely isolated. This is how I use multiple accounts.

This is true, but personally I've often found that this also prevents me from forcing a link to open in a new tab (via cmd-click) and have that new tab share cookies with its parent. Clicking on a link with target=_blank does work, though, which actually makes it more annoying that cmd-click does not.

Wow, that's crazy! Was actually going to take a look at Safari, you've saved me some time!

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