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Comment by frou_dh | Hacker News Reader

I've been puzzled reading previous discussions about Safari where people acted as if it doesn't have good ad-blocking, just because the brand name extension they're familiar with wasn't available. There has been very good ad-blocking available on Safari for a long time (both macOS and iOS) using for example AdGuard.

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Ad blockers on Safari effectively have the same weaknesses as ad blockers on Chrome now have since the deprecation of the blocking webRequest API (which Safari never supported).

See https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b... for some examples of things you can't do without those APIs.

As I understand it, AdGuard uses (in addition to a browser extension) a system-level local network proxy so can do anything to requests and responses?

Confusingly, there are 3 offerings: "AdGuard for Mac", "AdGuard for iOS" and "AdGuard for Safari" and I think it's the first 2 that are the good stuff, even for Safari.

> the blocking webRequest API (which Safari never supported)

This is inaccurate. Safari (Mac) supported it until 2019, and indeed there was a version of uBlock Origin for Safari back then.

Interesting, thanks for the correction.

I don't think uBlock Origin ever supported Safari?

https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158

Ah, unofficial fork

It was a fork. I'm not sure what you mean exactly by "unofficial". Gorhill said at the time that he didn't have time to maintain a Safari version, but he was aware of the fork, which mostly shared code with upstream, and seemingly endorsed the fork.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/About-Safari-and-Cana...

that said, gorhill has made a decent effort on making most uBlock/Adguard filter rules work within dNR.

the only problem is that you just don't have any choice for custom filters, it relies on prebaked resources.

Which is not a Safari restriction. Applications are allowed to revise those resources, they are not hardcoded into the bundle.

For privacy aware people it can be important that an open source and well trusted extension is available.

It's been possible for about a decade to use Firefox Focus as a Content Blocker for Safari. I assume it's open source, "well trusted" is of course subjective.

Firefox Focus doesn't exist on Mac, though.

I thought the whole point of iOS and macOS content blockers is that it does not have to be trusted, since there is never any data flowing out, only a list of blocked IP addresses that the operating system refers to (like a windows hosts (file).

My experience has been that installing AdGuard on my iPhone made no noticeable difference. To be fair, I barely browse on my phone. Basically only news sites and Reddit/HN. But apart from HN I see ads on all of those pages.

So I am just a puzzled by your point of view :) May I ask which App you are using? I would love to be proven wrong and have an ad-free browsing experience in the future.

Not sure what to troubleshoot with AdGuard, but from consulting mine that's working well, I'd ensure that both "Safari protection" and "Advanced protection" are enabled in its app, and that all of its Safari extensions in the system Settings app are enabled (and the main one is set to "All Websites: Allow").

Ah thanks! I only have Safari protection enabled, the advanced one requires me to pay (though I don't remember that from when I installed it a couple of months ago).

Saw someone else in this thread mention the Orion browser - I will give that a try for now. If I'm not satisfied I'll try paying for AdGuard. Thanks for the reply though!

Adblocking as links bloking can be sufficient, but sometimes you need to bring the big guns and alter the page content itself. Safari has even "Hide distracting elements" now, which can not be an extension. That cements the idea that most uBlock Origin features should be part of the browser to make it a wonderful user agent.

It's been possible to use Content Blockers for Safari for a long time, which alters the page content. Firefox Focus came out about a decade ago, and can be used as one.

A hide elements feature has been part of 1blocker for years now, definitely possible

There's a reason why this is uBlock Origin Lite and not uBlock Origin. Still works, but can't do the same thing as the extension for Firefox (desktop), for example.

The same thing happened when Chrome dropped mv2 support and a brand name ad blocking extention never upgraded beyond mv2.

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