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Comment by ffpip | Hacker News Reader

Install this wonderful extension to save hours of your time and gigabytes of your bandwidth.

Any good alternative for Safari?

I knew I would get alternative browser recommendations because of my phrasing... but I was also looking forward to them!

As far as Mac Safari recommendations, I've tried most of them. Better seems the leanest and most effective for me. I have no relationship with the developer.

https://better.fyi

From their website: "Better is hand-crafted by Small Technology Foundation, a tiny two-person-and-one-husky not-for-profit striving for social justice in the digital network age. We curate our own unique blocking rules for Better based on the principles of Ethical Design."

Nice app.

Be aware, Better actually allows most compact, low compute, non-tracking ads. Anyone who wants to serve me respectful ads that don't abuse my privacy or my compute resources are absolutely welcome on my system. Happy to help. Non-respectful ads are not welcome.

While I'm promoting small Indie browser extension makers, I also like the StopTheMadness extension. This kills lots of rude click/function hijacking that is done by many obnoxious web pages. It also stops a lot of tracking code. Again, I have no relationship with the developer.

https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/

Between the two of these, browsing becomes much less user hostile.

I find Firefox to be a great alternative for Safari.

I joke but from what I know it is only available for Firefox and it either will soon stop working/does not work on Chrome.

uBlock origin works fine on Chrome today as it has for years. With their new "no third party cookie" BS we might see it break but until then I don't think they can be so user hostile

/etc/hosts

https://github.com/Ultimate-Hosts-Blacklist/Ultimate.Hosts.B...

Remember the wall of text and flame wars posted on slashdot whenever hosts is mentioned

Firefox. But kidding aside, for what I've found on adblocks for Safari you need to pay and I believe those are quite inferior in blockage to uBlock.

If you are in the "I wish Safari blocked ads" boat but don't know where to go, let me recommend an out…

There are a lot of reasonable choices, I've been using Wipr for years. It does a good job of blocking ads and costs about $2. There are macOS and iOS versions, they update their lists, and because of the architecture have no access to your browsing so can never be tempted to start farming you.

(No affiliation, I haven't done an extensive comparison, but this one works and isn't expensive and you can stop worrying about what to do if you do this now.)

Have to agree here. I actually quite like safari, but cant use it due to no uBlock Origin which is unfortunate. uBlock and Facebook Container have made all the difference for me.

I use AdGuard, a content blocker that supports the major ABP lists like EasyList, Fanboy’s, etc. I wish there was a content blocker that support automatic translation of ABP lists into content blocker rules—I’ve been working on one but haven’t found the time to finish it.

To expand on adguard, you can self host their dns blocker via docker. It works really well and IMO a much nicer experience than trying to get pihole perfect.

For iOS: download Firefox focus and set it as Safaris content blocker.

For desktop & mobile: use something like nextdns/adguard or pihole & consider installing it on your home networks router.

I installed Magic Lasso and Firefox independently, and also together, and together they were basically perfect.

(It’s been 2 years or so, for all I know, they have both advanced to the point of being sufficient alone - but I did not experiment, since everything just works so well)

Wow, never knew FF Focus could be a content blocker on iOS. I'll try it over Wipr.

I run Wipr on Safari. It's quite cheap, and since I don't use Safari as my main browser, the fact that there's nothing to configure is a bonus.

It was also easier to install it on my parents' computers than to convince them to change browsers.

I've developed my own blocker for Safari, mostly because I was tired of other blockers breaking too many sites for me. So, it is designed to be less aggressive in filtering.

Give it a try if you want. It's free. https://ads-free.app/Ads-Free!%20Desktop/

AdGuard is a free extension that, as far as I can tell, is on-par with uBlock Origin. It's been great so far.

I've flip-flopped between uBlock and AdGuard for a while now. Generally find AdGuard to be slightly better and has a much nicer UI.

Also has a neat broken site reporting system in it which automatically generates a GitHub issue to fix the filter lists from a simplified form. Automatically prioritises sites via an algorithm, probably their Alexa ranking or something similar.

https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/issues

I've found the issues get fixed pretty quickly too.

They've got an iOS app as well which integrates with the Safari content blocking system.

uBlock or uBlock Origin? They are not the same thing.

Sorry, uBlock Origin

Not sure how applicable this is to Macs but I found that blocklists based on the hosts file cover almost all ads. The only exceptions I encountered were YouTube ads as well as ads hosted directly on the website, which is pretty rare nowadays.

https://github.com/notracking/hosts-blocklists

Use this for network wide blocking of all sorts of virtual garbage. Not only for safari, but all your locally connected devices.

safari on iphone uses a system-wide ad-block list, so no need for browser plugins.

'1block'[1] kills even the video-ads on yt for free. 'firefox focus' has built-in ad-blocking but does not get the yt-ads afaik.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/app/id1365531024

Just use NextDNS. DNS blocking is just so much more efficient. And gets the job done 98% of time.

Adguard, its also usable for free and doesn't have shady deals with ad companies.

It's 2021. Who isn't using an ad blocker?

have been pressing this for around 15years meanwhile the percentage of adblock users actually got smaller.

i wonder if the the fact that the most popular ad-tech company also producing the most popular mobile os has something to do with it.

Does this number includes mobile browsers? Given the big mobile browsers do not have adblockers (or even extensions altogether?), that would explain it.

Mobile Safari has had content blockers for years.

And yet, surprisingly, almost no one is aware of it.

I have informed many of my technophile, uBO/ABP friends and colleagues that it’s possible, and not one of them was aware before I told them.

same here. then again a lot of "technophile" folks are in webdev and favor a vanilla browser experience.

pretty sure that mobile and the inclusion of masses of tech-unsavy users is responsible.

I don't use uBlock. But I learned how to write chrome extensions and it turned out extremely easy to insert my own CSS and JS snippets to the selected pages. So I just added few URL filters to remove most obnoxious tracking and ads, I added very few CSS edits to the selected websites to remove popups and I added some JS to youtube to remove its ads. Web is pretty fast and usable for me. I did not cut every ad, but I don't often browse new websites and I'm okay with some ads as long as they're not very bad.

The reason I don't use uBlock is because I think that it's overkill for me to run thousands of filters for every website in the world. And also I like the fact that I'm in control of my user agent. For example recently I turned off feature on some website which paused video when I switched to another tab. I did not like that feature, so I disabled corresponding JS handler, simple as that.

> The reason I don't use uBlock is because I think that it's overkill for me to run thousands of filters for every website in the world.

In return you get thousands of lines of tracking and advertisement JavaScript running on your machine for almost every website in the world.

Is that better? ;)

I don't use an ad blocker - I feel bad since ad revenue is the only thing most of these sites have (OTOH, I don't run ads on my own blog because I don't like what the ad-supported internet has become).

You should reconsider. Facebook made more than $80 billion in revenue, a majority of it through ads.

75% of internet users

And what percent of those are real humans?

Almost all of them I assume? Browser ad blocking is much less widespread than people seem to think, otherwise there wouldn't be so many ~trillion dollar companies built around tracking and advertising on the internet.

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