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Disclaimer: I don't develop ad blockers or any other plugins, and the change I'm actually the maddest about is that uBlock Origin stopped working when Apple st

by parsimo2010 6y ago

Disclaimer: I don't develop ad blockers or any other plugins, and the change I'm actually the maddest about is that uBlock Origin stopped working when Apple stopped supporting WebExtensions. I may be less mad about uMatrix simply because it wasn't on Safari in the first place. I'm not 100% sure on the reason why uMatrix wasn't available on Safari, but I think it's because content blockers aren't allowed to see any user data. Ad blocking plugins just send a list of content to block to the content blocking API, and Safari does all the blocking and doesn't send any data to the plugin. So uMatrix's intuitive UI that GP was talking about isn't possible. Apple claimed that they stopped supporting WebExtensions and made the content blocking API in the interest of user privacy, but all it really did was drive users to other browsers. In typical Apple fashion, they decided what was best for me when (AFAIK) I've never had a problem with an untrustworthy plugin stealing my information. It might technically be possible to functionally implement uMatrix with multiple plugins (one to interact with the DOM to figure out what to block, then generate the blocking list, and one to deal with the content blocking API) but all the plugins I've seen don't do it. Maybe it's not possible, maybe the extra development effort isn't worth it to support a single browser that has fairly low usage.

acdha 6y ago
> Apple claimed that they stopped supporting WebExtensions and made the content blocking API in the interest of user privacy, but all it really did was drive users to other browsers. I’m not sure I’ve seen that - the number of Safari users had been pretty constant on my sites, and the main pressure seem to be the Chrome pushes on Google sites. I think the UI challenges of Safari’s approach are a big problem but on the other hand there were years of people blaming browsers for ABP’s bad performance and users privacy was definitely sold out by unethical developers. As a user it definitely is easier to trust one over the other.
saagarjha 6y ago
> one to interact with the DOM to figure out what to block, then generate the blocking list, and one to deal with the content blocking API No, it's not possible to do performantly. You can't dynamically update your blocking list that quickly, the JSON rule list must go through WebKit and that can easily take multiple seconds.

acdha 6y ago

> Apple claimed that they stopped supporting WebExtensions and made the content blocking API in the interest of user privacy, but all it really did was drive users to other browsers. I’m not sure I’ve seen that - the number of Safari users had been pretty constant on my sites, and the main pressure seem to be the Chrome pushes on Google sites. I think the UI challenges of Safari’s approach are a big problem but on the other hand there were years of people blaming browsers for ABP’s bad performance and users privacy was definitely sold out by unethical developers. As a user it definitely is easier to trust one over the other.

saagarjha 6y ago

> one to interact with the DOM to figure out what to block, then generate the blocking list, and one to deal with the content blocking API No, it's not possible to do performantly. You can't dynamically update your blocking list that quickly, the JSON rule list must go through WebKit and that can easily take multiple seconds.