Hacker News Reader

Comment by skygazer | Hacker News Reader

I'm like the parent, on Safari – apparently also using an "inferior" way to block ads that, somehow, inexplicably, works 100% of the time and has never let an ad slip through. Is it supposed to be inferior because it's brittle and requires constant work on the side of the developer? Is it blocking too much and I'm just not aware of it? Is there some new ad tech that it's not prepared for, and can't adapt to, and will fail in the near future?

View on HN

It’s inferior AFAICT because the API is more limited, and it looks an awful lot like the world’s biggest ad company (Google) has arranged that specifically to be less effective for ad and tracker blocking.

It’s a good reason to use Firefox.

It's also inferior because the filter lists for requests must be hardcoded and can only be changed through extension updates, which Google (or whoever owns the browser's extension store) can delay or block at their discretion.

This also means users can't install their own filters, which was widely used when YouTube began aggressively bypassing adblockers.

>It's also inferior because the filter lists for requests must be hardcoded and can only be changed through extension updates, which Google (or whoever owns the browser's extension store) can delay or block at their discretion.

This thread is about safari, and its declarative ad blocking API doesn't have this issue.

And I also don't want to be too dependent on the browser vendor to sign a plugin.

There is a lot of talk about security but strategic security would mean to put flashing red warning signs on the manifest updates.

To neglect that is basically lying to users in my opinion.

Ublock origin is more than an adblocker. You can target entire site elements you don’t like loading. Screw it, delete the entire youtube recommendations sidebar and live in bliss. Is it possible to learn this power? Not from a Jedi.

"Use Distraction Control in Safari to hide items on a webpage"

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/120682

You can roll your own filter regex to catch future similar elements as well in ublock origin. Way more powerful. I’d figure HN users would want the actual reigns.

I use 1Blocker with Safari, and I create custom regex/css blocking rules all the time, and as a bonus, they auto sync between desktop and mobile. Also, the rules update independent of the extension. I'm not aware of experiencing the purported downsides some folks dogmatically cite in this thread. I'm happy to learn the error of my ways, but only if it's real.

Me too but expect this to stop working though.

Why? Apple has a vested interest in keeping ad blocking working in Safari - it hurts Google, which is their primary competitor.

They adopted declarativeWebRequest as the exclusive option for "content blocking" years ago, which requires an actual extension update to change blocked URLs. It allows for some optimizations that look nice on benchmarks, but in reality uBO makes the web faster by getting rid of a lot of tracking requests and javascript. Nobody in the ad industry cared, because Safari's share is so small and plastering Safari users that use this basic adblocking in ads probably would've made them move elsewhere.

Chrome doing this however changes the value of working around adblockers, because they now lack the ability to rapidly respond or match with code (that's not regex) or even reading a bit of the response.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com