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Comment by skygazer

1 day ago

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?

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skygazer

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grugagag  1 day ago

Me too but expect this to stop working though.

  • int_19h  16 hours ago

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

    • asmor  9 hours ago

      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.

Nursie  1 day ago

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.

  • mzajc  1 day ago

    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.

    • raxxorraxor  2 hours ago

      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.

    • gruez  18 hours ago

      >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.