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Comment by frankjr | Hacker News Reader

I would really like to give Safari a chance but I just cannot get over the fact that there's no support for more advanced ad blockers. Sticking with Firefox/Brave for now.

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I'm extremely happy with Safari's approach to blockers. I very much appreciate that it is impossible for the extension to receive every URL you are browsing. I've been using AdGuard for Safari (GPL3) and it seems to work perfectly.

I'm shocked you'd choose Brave over this, whose security history and business model is very, very questionable.

How can you block URLs without seeing them? Is it something where the blocker has to submit all blocked URLs beforehand? Hashing?

The blocker provides a list of patterns to the browser, and the browser itself does the blocking.

So it can't block youtube ads then, for example.

Prepare for future, where such ad system is going to be standard and ad blockers useless.

This seems to be possible, not entirely sure how though.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...

Vinegar replaces the YouTube player with the baked in HTML5 video player. It blocks ads, but YT also restricts quality and many advanced features are not supported.

It does, at least for me (using free AdGuard).

I've noticed YouTube seem to have introduced (or are testing?) some sort of partial countermeasures recently that sneaks occasional ads through. I don't see anything like the quantity of ads I get in the YouTube iOS app, just the occasional one ad every now and then?

In practice safari blocks all ads I can see, youtube ads might be an exception but it's one of the few services that is 100% worth paying for, considering how crucial they are, how much time most of us spend watching content there, and how fair their premium offering is.

It does block Youtube ads but very poorly. Sometimes the ad plays but a refresh immediately removes it, other times it can take multiple refreshes. It's not perfect like it is when i use Firefox or Opera so I stick to Yputube on those and Safari for general browsing.

Sidenote: Also Gmail is insaaaaaaaaaanely slow on Safari and a lot of sites just don't format well or ad blockers completely break the site. Safari is by far the worst browser on Mac for site compatibility and also extension selection but I use it for better battery life when not plugged in.

> "Sidenote: Also Gmail is insaaaaaaaaaanely slow on Safari"

Huh? I haven't seen this. I have 280,000+ messages (> 20 GB) in my Gmail and everything always works pretty much instantly in Gmail on Safari. Never see any slowness unless my internet connection is very bad, and even then Gmail does a decent job of hiding it.

(Don't get me started about Apple Mail on iOS being incredibly slow at loading Gmail messages, however...)

Not being able to block YouTube ads is always used as some kind of gotcha, but for me the trade-off is easily worth it.

Besides, blocking YouTube ads seems a lot scummier than blocking regular ads. Ad least some percentage of that ad revenue goes to the creator of the video you're watching, and not to Google. It's why I'm happy to subscribe to YouTube Premium.

I expect that at some point, declarative list ad blockers will stop working as well as they do today.

The companies with an interest in working around them probably temper their efforts, because they are aware it drives people to things like uBlock Origin that have more smarts, live heuristics, etc. Once manifest v3 kills that option off, there won't be any easy place for end users to escalate to. Then, they are free to start being more aggressive. Whatever measures they take would work around all the DNS based and declarative semi-static list based approaches.

You might like Orion from Kagi. https://browser.kagi.com/

Got recommended Orion from one these threads and haven't looked back. Love Orion!

Huge fan of Kagi and Orion, though unfortunately I couldn't live without Firefox's Multi Account Containers. I'd hop back to Orion in a heartbeat if they had something comparable.

(And also it's been three months since I used Orion, and development is fast-paced, so things could have changed a lot since then)

They are still working on it. [1]

Personally, Right now I basically resorted to using several profiles but it only supports 1 profile per window so I end up having sometimes 3 windows at the same time. I still switch from time to time to Firefox but it has actually helped me sometimes to keep focus (I.e work).

1. https://orionfeedback.org/d/43-something-like-firefox-multi-...

Thanks, I didn't know about this one, will try it out.

I love safari but the ad blocking sucks, having to run stupid stuff on top (AdGuard for Safari)

This doesn't seem to be true anymore, with products like Wipr Extras going beyond the content blocker API:

https://giorgiocalderolla.com/wipr-faq.html#what-is-wipr-ext...

Naturally, Safari Extensions seem to more frequently cost money since Apple's developers have to pay for Mac hardware and developer accounts. But to say that Safari doesn't have good enough extension capability from a technological level doesn't seem to be true anymore.

On my Mac Safari is my default browser due to the battery efficiency and OS integration (e.g., SMS code integration), but I do sometimes use Firefox/Chrome for specific websites where needed, something like 5% of the time.

... what do you mean by "more advanced"? The default/efficient approach with Safari is content blockers (i.e. a precompiled list of url patterns to block in the engine itself), but extensions can also include javascript too.

1Blocker - a well known 'traditional' safari content-blocker - does this for example, to provide ad blocking on sites like YouTube.

I've found that AdBlockers on Safari don't work well at all. I have 1Blocker on my iPad, and not only does it fail to block YouTube and many other ads, it also seems to slow down Safari and induce crashes + memory leaks.

I have to admit I don't use 1Blocker for YouTube ads. I use Vinegar, which isn't strictly speaking an ad blocker - what it does is replace the custom YT player with a native platform player (i.e. regular controls you get with a plain <video> element)...

this has the side-effect of removing all Youtube ads, and you get familiar controls for the video player.

I can't say I've seen any issue with performance or crashes due to 1blocker being active, on phone or Mac (I have on my iPad too but dont use that device any where near as much as the phone/mac)

1Blocker works fine for blocking YouTube. Are you sure you have the `1Blocker Actions` and `1Blocker Scripts` extensions enabled?

I use Wipr and it handles everything including YouTube ads (iPhone & Mac)

Strange, I also have 1Blocker on my iPad, and it blocks YouTube ads just fine in safari.

I use 1Blocker on both my Mac and my iPad/iPhone and have had no issues with it blocking YouTube ads.

I kinda wish I could use 1Blocker on my Apple TV :P

What do you get with advanced ad blockers? I'm using 1Blocker on Safari — what am I missing out on?

Things like blocking ads in YouTube videos, I guess.

There’s an extension for Safari called Vinegar who does this, and due to how Safari works it works on both desktop and mobile!

Have AdGuard for Safari and see no YouTube ads (or anywhere else).

Wipr blocks YouTube ads without replacing the video player

AdGuard (the full, paid version for MacOS) is the way. I don't use Safari anymore, but I'm still happy enough with it to not install anything else for other browsers. Unfortunately, the iOS version only works as an extension for Safari.

Ka-Block!

Open Source ad-blocker with silly name but its great.

Vinegar

Native video player on youtube, also means no ads.

Hush

Hides cookie consent dialogs (this sometimes break some sites, thanks EU)

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