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Comment by bigDinosaur | Hacker News Reader

You can't do proper adblocking (e.g. uBlock Origin) on Safari. That's why I don't really use it except when on battery and out travelling - and even then I'll often avoid using Safari since ads are so awful. Yes, I've tried the Safari adblockers, they suck. As far as I can tell they do marginally more at best than a DNS block.

Once you can't use uBlock Origin with Chrome due to the proposed Manifest V3, Firefox will be the only real option.

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I have been using AdGuard for Safari [1] for years and it works great.

Alternatively, many VPN providers offer ad-blocking services, e.g. Mullvad [2].

Both of them use EasyList [3], and you can enhance it yourself with additional (custom) filters.

[1] https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardForSafari

[2] https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2021/5/27/how-set-ad-blocking-ou...

[3] https://easylist.to

Seconding AdGuard for Safari. It's free, open source, has customizable blocklists, and seems to work as well as uBlock ever did.

Thirding AdGuard for Safari.

Fourthing — it’s as good an adblocker as any extension I ever used on chrome.

Fifthing. I use it and works just fine.

This was one of the main reasons we built the Orion browser [1].

Lightweight and faster than Safari in benchmarks, same WebKit engine and able to run Chrome and Firefox extensions out of the box, including uBlock Origin. Still in beta and you can try it for free. It is zero telemetry and completely user supported through Orion+ subscription. Has a very active feedback forum at OrionFeedback.org.

[1] https://browser.kagi.com

I love Orion (and Kagi), and it works extremely well for me, despite some bugs (all of which are reported).

I use Wipr and I rarely ever see an ad

Same. In my experience it’s only marginally less effective than uBlock Origin. You do have to open the app to make sure the rules are loaded once in a blue moon though.

That said if uBlock is a requirement, there’s Orion[0] which is a WebKit-based browser that supports both the Chrome and Firefox version of uBO on both macOS and iOS.

[0]: https://browser.kagi.com/

To add to the other responses here, I won't deny the lack of uBlock Origin was a painful point for me going all in with safari on Mac; even the previous broken incarnation that had to be manually built and was a bit buggy was still fantastic compared to non-uBlockOrigin alternatives.

A small combination of user scripts for YouTube specific blocking with TamperMonkey and Wipr+KaBlock+1Block seem to work, with only Wipr requiring a purchase.

But I really wish Apple would walk back the position on how ad blocking runs in safari, as uBlock Origin made the argument for Safari much more convenient.

It is good though that a small number of user scripts and extensions get it "close enough"; I mainly miss element zapping/blocking from uBlock Origin at this point.

That’s possible with the adblocker I use, 1Blocker. On every platform too.

I use Wipr on Safari, cost $2 or something but it does a good job.

As the author of the linked article, there's over 250,000 users of our Safari-exclusive ad blocker[1] with few complaints.

It is able to block all ads, trackers and annoyances that users encounter. Including all YouTube ads.

Don't disagree that there are some limitations with more contemporary ad blocking approaches but they do the job for most users needs. These approaches will likely continue to evolve and include necessary capabilities to do more in the future.

[1] https://www.magiclasso.co/

nice self-promotion. But anyways, what's the story on Safari's support for manifest v2 going forward?

Safari 15.4 and later supports manifest versions 2 and 3. [1]

Mozilla maintains a list of which keys are compatible across which browsers as well [2]

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/saf...

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

good to hear, thanks for the resources. Do you know if Apple has made any specific statements or commitments to continuing to support v2 for the foreseeable future?

There were no official statements, but an engineer at Apple working on extensions said that "Apple sees extension APIs as long term support".

https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/298#issuecomment...

Relax, sure it’s self promotion, but they are the author of the TFA so it’s not like they’re jumping into a random thread.

So some honest feedback on Magic Lasso.

I just went to give it a try, as the website copy says "Free from the App Store" and "optional Pro subscription", however, I was disappointed that the pro subscription is required to give it a try. It just says "Magic Lasso is disabled" and requires me to start a 1 month free trial. Really feels bait-and-switch.

I uninstalled it without subscribing, as my personal feeling on it is if you don't believe in the product that you have to, frankly, mislead me before installing it, it's not worth trying. I'd feel very different if the website was clear on the pro subscription requirement.

Will update this copy of the website. The subscription requirement only recently changed (in the last few weeks).

Tried your app and it had some of the worst dark patterns experience I've yet seen on iOS.

If it's not a scam it at least works hard to appear as a scam.

Same. Safari has always been very performant, but it doesn't matter when you're basically running around naked without ublock.

As others have pointed out, the narrative "no adblocks on Safari" is a lie.

There's no uBlock Origin, sure, but AdGuard for Safari is a good alternative. And you can complement that with StopTheMadness if you so wish.

Maybe I'm crazy, but I've never had browser level ad blocking on any browser on any OS I've ever used, and I've used most of them.

I've read that uBlock Origin remains difficult to circumvent by anti-adblock techniques employed on sites today, and the sites where ads are blocked by Safari's content blockers simply haven't made the effort yet. I don't have any experience in this area, and would love someone who does to chime in.

Isn't the anti-adblock technique being used today to simply make the content of the site shill for the advertisers? How would that be blockable?

Not exactly; this is a bit of semantics, but "Native Advertising" is different than traditional advertising, and Native Advertising might be _an_ answer to ad-blocking, but it's by no means _the_ answer.

Native Advertising seems to be at this stage fairly tame, but I don't hold any belief that it can't/won't change. If it stays at the level where the most you get is 30 seconds of a YouTube video dedicated to ads and occasional ad-only articles, in my opinion it's fine. It's still annoying, but it's not the immediately disruptive experience that more traditional web advertising are, and with YouTube at least, it seems many of the creators have settled on having predictable timing for their ad segment, either right after their intro or right at the end, and I think this is a healthy way of handling it. It's not interrupting the actual videos typically, the advertisers get their precious views and tracking, and the creators get paid. With native advertising articles, it's fairly fast to recognize that there's no real information in an article and to just skip it; if the authors still get paid and the advertisers are satisfied with the screen time, then so be it, I'm ultimately not too annoyed by such a situation as I don't get interrupted by ads.

I hate advertising in general, but with the above, I would call it acceptable for the time being; I haven't even bothered with the YouTube ad segment skip plugins/scripts for such items.

I use 1Blocker which seems to do a perfectly good job, so I’m not sure what ads you’re referring to?

There is also Brave, which has its own rust-based adblocker, that's not dependent on the extension API.

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