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Comment by qz2 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

1Blocker is a rip off. Wipr doesn't work properly. ABP lets a lot of ads through. There is nothing that approaches uBlock at all.

> Wipr doesn't work properly.

How does it not work properly? Been using it and am pretty satisfied so far.

try Adguard. It's the best one for this Apple interface for adblocking.

…which requires an Electron app to constantly be running for it to really work. Not great.

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.

Untrue in my understanding.

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.

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.

No problems with Wipr here, at all..

Wipr works outstanding for me on both iOS and macOS.

Still get pop unders on both.

Where? I get 0 popus or popunders and I use wipr and no other adblockers.

Try an average torrent site.

Ghostery seems to work fine

People jumped off Ghostery long time ago. Maybe things have changed since the whole Cliqz story

Consider setting up a pihole locally or on a vps.

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.

for the express[ed] purpose

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.

Yeah, I guess if you insert the incorrect [ed], it becomes incorrect.

I wonder if the newly enabled safari extension capabilities paired with pihole largely cover for what is missing from what Chrome can do.

Or NextDNS.io if you trust them. I do and it's super convenient, both on desktop and mobile.

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