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Comment by forgotoldacc | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Adguard for a couple years and have had no problems. I think I've only seen ads slip through a couple times. If there's anyone who's able to compare, is there any real difference between these ad blockers?

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AdGuard always bothered me. On macOS it sits in the menubar and has about a half dozen extensions that load into Safari. It felt like a bloated sprawling mess. I just installed uBOL and it's a single extension that sits in Safari. It feel much more clean and unobtrusive.

> has about a half dozen extensions that load into Safari

That’s because there’s a limit on the number of filters per extension. uBO may eventually need to do the same.

Interesting...

https://adguard.com/kb/adguard-for-safari/solving-problems/r...

Sounds like I should direct a portion of my ire toward Apple on this.

Absolutely not. They are trying to protect you, can you imagine how awful Safari would be if it let you sideload such nasty extensions? It would be just like Chrome, absolutely no market variation to speak of! Despicable.

It's really AdGuard's fault for failing to fit their functionality within the arbitrary constraints Apple decided was suitable for a runtime.

It is not an arbitrary decision.

For one Safari compiles block lists to perform better, but it can be noticed at startup for big lists.

Then there is just resource constraints since the focus is mobile. Chrome on mobile notably supports no extensions.

But I do wish desktop Safari was more lenient.

Chrome's decision is also entirely arbitrary, so it's not a great example. Firefox on mobile notable supports Chrome extensions, without any real issues or battery drain whatsoever.

You can disable the menu bar icon in settings...

That’s in fact one of the gripes I have with certain MacOS software. It would be far better if menu bar icons were opt-in rather than opt-out. The average non-technical user eventually ends up having tons of these icons in the menu bar.

The latest version will let you remove them even if the app itself doesn't let you.

I mean, that’s great, but it would be even better if MacOS required explicit permissions before allowing an app to place an icon in the menu bar.

The existence of a menubar icon as an option implies it’s a service that needs to run all the time. I compare that perception to what uBOL mentions in the App Store description.

> uBOL is entirely declarative, meaning there is no need for a permanent uBOL process for the filtering to occur, and CSS/JS injection-based content filtering is performed reliably by the browser itself rather than by the extension. This means that uBOL itself does not consume CPU memory resources while content blocking is ongoing -- uBOL's service worker process is required _only_ when you interact with the popup panel or the option pages.

I believe if you do that, the filter lists don't auto-update. That's the reason for the menu bar app.

If you disable it, you can still see (silently delivered) notifications about filter updates.

EDIT: On a fresh install, AdGuard prompts to run in the background for extension updates. I also tend to separately toggle "launch AdGuard for Safari at Login" option.

Just adding another alternative that I've been using for years for people to consider - 1Blocker.

https://1blocker.com/

1Blocker is worth the one time lifetime purchase, works with your family iCloud+ account.

This and Little Snitch Mini.

I cancelled my Adguard subscription when I found out the founder and team are russian. That's big enough of a difference for me.

Used to be Russian. The company moved to Cyprus.

Most of their software (including AdGuard for Safari and AdGuard Home) is open source, so there's little chance of anything nefarious happening.

Except there's no easy way to verify that what you get from the store has been built, unmodified, from the public source - afaik.

(I still use AdGuard fwiw)

AdGuard Home has no "store". You download it yourself. I believe the same is possible for the Safari plugin - they're not required to be obtained from the App Store.

It's been a few years since I've used an Iphone, but back then I used AdGuard. It wasn't terrible, but I encountered frequent breakage, and updating it (rules) was miserable and slow.

The generally awful and sad state of web browing on IOS was a big reason why I switched to Android.

i've also been using adguard for years. Yes it's paid, but it actually works. I use it on mac and ios. none of the free( at the time) ad blockers worked as well. or they constantly needed updates, or certain things broke etc. adguard is a great product. not affiliated, not sponsored, just a user.

It's even better than you say because the free version—for Safari only—works very well.

Adguard is still better because it ships multiple extensions that you can enable to bypass filter limit on iOS. uBlock Origin Lite is not able to block annoying Google sign in pop ups, yet.

Thanks for asking this. I have always had Adguard on iOS with no issues wondering if there is any extra benefit to switching to uBlock Origin Lite on Safari.

I’ve been testing it in beta for a month or so and I can report that at least to me websites load much faster than with Adguard or Wipr.

Adguard on macOS constantly runs an Electron app in the background :(

It doesn't. The Electron app is for settings, and you can just quit it.

Commercial offerings can always slip towards allowing some ads for pay.

Maybe not today, but there's no guarantee the company won't get sold tomorrow.

Not to mention that your AdGuard seems to be one of the 10 billion apps that competes for my subscriptions budget.

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