Comment by concinds
7 months ago
People should be way more upset at the fact that Safari adblocking today is still inferior to even MV3 Google Chrome. Apple's implementation of declarativeNetRequest was semi-broken until the very latest iOS 18.6.
Apple can do the bare minimum, years after everyone else, and barely get called out. The Reality Distortion Field is the enemy.
Also funny that other devs had the gall to make people pay (sometimes subscriptions!) for Safari adblockers inferior to the free adblockers on any other browser.
The release notes mentioning this: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-not...
Not too many sources I could find other than https://matisyahu.blog/2025/07/31/and-it-is-raining-again/ - but apparently the bug was so bad that any adblocker attempting to use declarativeNetRequest could break all Cloudflare websites for the user.
In the wake of Google finally sounding the death knells of Manifest V2, it's good to see Apple's at least making progress towards... parity with Google's MV3 feature set? Not the privacy leadership that Apple's known for, but progress is progress.
No wonder I could never get past the cloudflare human check pages!
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Screw Chrome; both Safari and Chrome are inferior to Firefox' adblocking toolkit
And for the record Ublock Origin used to have a Safari extension. But that was forced to be phased out a couple of OS updates ago for reasons I can't remember.
In any case, as someone who will not touch Google's spyware browser with a ten-foot pole, it's nice to have a flagship alternative to Firefox that does decent adblocking.
What makes you think Google Chrome is spyware?
Besides lsof and netstat?
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Dude do you even know how much telemetry Chrome sends back to the mothership?
I agree with you regarding how Apple can do the bare minimum and barely get called out. But the fact is, I don't know of anything who's using declarativeNetRequest on Safari. The ecosystem of Safari blocking is centered around the legacy technology of content blockers from 2015. And the legacy technology works well enough that there's no pressure for either Apple or adblocker developers to adopt the new thing.
The legacy technology is also privacy-protecting in the sense that normal ad-blocking on iOS doesn’t use any third party JS filtering or reading of data on the page.
It breaks down because there are a ton of workarounds sites and ad-networks implement so it’s not super effective compared to MV2 ublock-origin
The privacy aspect is big. Even if content blocker extensions technically aren’t as capable, they were nice because they could be installed with impunity regardless of the party responsible for developing them. It’s a tradeoff.
In practice I’ve found them to be largely effective except for the most awful sites that I should probably be finding alernatives to instead of using (vote with your eyeballs), which is something I do even where “real” uBlock Origin is an option.
Only in theory, not in practice. Every Safari adblocker I've seen also uses scripts and requests permission to "modify data on all websites", because you can't effectively block ads without that (especially pre-18.6). I assume most users grant it.
So actually, you had closed-source extensions with full access to every webpage. Literally zero privacy benefit compared to the status quo ante. I doubt Apple thought it through.
Yeah but we are comparing that against MV3 uBlock Origin Lite which is the subject of this article. They are the same in terms of privacy protection.
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> legacy technology … 2015
If there’s anything that makes you feel old, it’s this.
What’s the alternative? Using an Android phone with all of Google’s surveillance? A windows laptop with bad battery life, bloatware, and Microsoft’s increasingly bad dark pattern abuse? I feel like no matter what, consumers are screwed.
I have been extremely happy with GrapheneOS. The built-in browser includes ad blocking, although it is not as good as uBlock Origin.
Just run Firefox for Android. You can run a full copy of mv2 ublock origin
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How is the overall Graphene OS experience? Do you have any problems with banking or payment apps?
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I ditched my Mac after 10.15 and never looked back. Consumers will survive.
What did you get instead?
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I'm using Librem 5, a GNU/Linux phone with PureOS (Debian derivative). Full desktop Firefox runs smoothly with all desktop plugins.
How's Librem as a daily driver? Battery life, camera, reception/calls etc? I'm eager to get a proper Linux phone, but got burned by the awful performance of Pinephone.
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Getting Apple to allow you to use Firefox? Instead of geoblocking that for EU?
GrapheneOS. Linux. Gecko-based browsers.
> The Reality Distortion Field is the enemy.
Don't get me started on apple's "privacy is a right" marketing nonsense.
for all intents and purposes, it does not apply to your phone.
Can you firewall your phone? Can you figure out what is executing? Can you figure out what an app does or who it contacts?
Most people don't know that Apple knows your location at all times (since Location Services go through their servers) and the contents of all notifications (which go through their servers too). A few apps (like Signal) go out of their way to ensure notifications are private, but most don't.
I imagine Apple has 20 billion reasons annually why not to enhance adblocking.
Yeah that Google Search Deal is a 36% revenue share agreement for ad revenue stemming from being the default search engine, presumably that includes visiting a search result and then interacting with ads upon that page.
Apple's software is generally low quality with more bugs and less features than equivalent linux/oss software. There is a long list of 5, 10 - year old, well-known bugs that apple simply ignores. They know their userbase is built off of marketing and 'design', not product quality.
> Also funny that other devs had the gall to make people pay (sometimes subscriptions!) for Safari adblockers inferior to the free adblockers on any other browser.
That's absolutely perfect, and fits into the typical apple fangirl pattern that can be readily seen on hackernews - pseudo-technical people promoting some closed cute-looking macos app that's just objectively worse existing OSS alternatives.
I find it analogous to when financially successful people in their mid-life crisis stage decide to buy a 'nice' car, while not having any interest in cars previously. They invariably seem to end up with the the most flashy/marketed car, even though that car is objectively worse than another car for half the price. They will extol the car's virtue in a way that sounds like they are literally reading off of a marketing brochure, and actual car people just laugh at them.
Yeah. Fantastic hardware, very decent OSes, mostly mediocre software, though it tends to be clean and minimalistic at least. Thank God for third-party devs and especially open-source.
> apple fangirl
Tends to be dudes, in my experience.
That’s funny, I remember the only way to block ads on my Android phone back many years ago was to root it. I was thrilled how easy it was to block ads on the iPhone when I switched.
Reverse for me. I daily drive an Android and a iPhone. Using AdGuard on both for devices for device level ad blocking. The quality of getting ads blocked on android is super high while it's medium to low on ios when using chrome.
The solution is trivial. Don't make Apple applications, don't use Apple products. Build for open protocols. Otherwise, go through life as if Apple didn't exist.
Walled gardens are an abomination.