Apple did the same thing to ad blockers in safari as chrome will

[spartaman64]

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There's been much said about Google's supposed plans to limit the power of ad blockers in Chrome, but something similar has already happened in Safari, and not that many people have noticed, let alone criticize Apple.

Over the course of the last year and a half, Apple has effectively neutered ad blockers in Safari, something that Google has been heavily criticized all this year.

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For Apple users, it all started a few years back when the company announced App Extensions, a mechanism through which apps could extend their functionality into other apps.

Apple said that App Extensions would work in tandem with Content Blocker, a mechanism introduced in iOS 9, in 2013. Basically, apps or app extensions can use the Content Blocker API tell Safari what to block based on a set of rules before rendering a web page.

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After letting these two features spread in the app ecosystem for a few years, Apple realized it didn't need web developers creating extensions for Safari directly, as they could simply leverage the apps in its App Store to provide Safari users with extra features.

These two features made Safari's older extensions ecosystem obsolete. As a result, in mid-2018, Apple announced it was deprecating old "legacy" extensions and started advising Safari extensions devs to port their code to an "app extension" and upload it on the App Store.

The first move to enforce this came in September 2018 when Apple launched iOS 12, and the OS maker began blocking the installation of legacy Safari extensions from outside the Safari Extensions Gallery.

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The message appeared for all sorts of legacy extensions, from simple copy-paste enhancers to ad blockers and antivirus parental control extensions.

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However, the move had some casualties. Ad blockers, VPN, and parental control extensions were the most impacted by Apple's new "app extensions + content blocker" ecosystem.

Ad blocker AdGuard shut down its Safari extension in July last year. A few days later, it was followed by antivirus maker Malwarebytes, which shut down its VPN extension. AdBlock published a blog post where it said its re-written Safari ad blocker was running faster than before, but also listed a long list of downsides.

Other apps also followed in September 2018, when Apple's new rules were set in stone with iOS 12's release.

The latest to fall is uBlock Origin for Safari, another ad blocker, which shut down for good two weeks ago. In a post on GitHub, the extension's developer recommended that users who care about running an ad blocker either switch to using Firefox for Mac, where ad blockers still work just fine, or remain on an older Safari version, which is not really an option.

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The other alternative was that users switch to using one of the new Content Blocker-based ad blockers; however, he described the new Content Blocker system as being "extremley limited in adblocking functions."

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Google wanted to limit the maximum rules an extension could pass to Chrome to 30,000, which many Chrome extension developers said was extremely low, and wouldn't even begin to accommodate the likes of ad blockers, parental control or traffic inspection extensions.

The company was immediatelly attacked for trying to "kill ad blockers," and after months of criticism, Google eventually backed down on its initial plan and settled on a higher limit ranging from 90,000 to 120,000, a number that many extension developers, and especially those managing ad blockers, still consider insufficient.

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On the other side, when Apple rolled out the new Content Blocker API, it enforced a maximum limit of 50,000 rules for each new extension that wanted to block content inside Safari. Of course AdBlock was running faster. It had fewer rules to apply than before.

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The bottom line is that there's no way to install a classic Safari ad blocker starting this week, and that Apple is expected to remove or disable old Safari legacy extensions from users' browsers sometime in the future, for good.

If users have moved to a new ad blocker that they downloaded from the App Store, then it may not be actually blocking all the ads, as users expect.

source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-neutered-ad-blockers-in-safari-but-unlike-chrome-users-didnt-say-a-thing/

 

I didn't know that you can even install extensions for safari and I'm guessing lots of people people don't either so maybe that was one of the reasons why people didn't make as much of a fuss. I have no idea how well ad blockers function on safari so maybe someone who uses them can offer some insight into that in the replies but if they function fine with the 50,000 rules limit then a 120,000 rule limit for chrome won't be as debilitating to ad blockers as people make it out to be but if they don't function then there might be a problem with the limit.

[suicidalfranco]

all i can say is that tampermonkey no longer works on my mac

[The King of the Undead]

It's a good time to be a Firefox user.

[Dabombinable]

Wait...an ad blocker that slows down web browsing? Even my i7 4770 (3.9 all core) and 4790K (4.7 all core) take forever to load some pages due to how aids ridden some websites are, making an adblocker mandatory for them.

[serebrina]

I would like to see less advertising. I constantly have to clean my computer

[Tenelia]

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These two features made Safari's older extensions ecosystem obsolete. As a result, in mid-2018, Apple announced it was deprecating old "legacy" extensions and started advising Safari extensions devs to port their code to an "app extension" and upload it on the App Store.

How is that equivalent to the title? Clickbait? Fake news? Hello? Devs were long ago warned about this to port over. They were not blocked like what Google is doing in Chrome.

[Flott]

17 hours ago, suicidalfranco said:

all i can say is that tampermonkey no longer works on my mac

Same here. I switched back to firefox on my Mac because of this. It's a good thing that Mozilla are finally starting to fix the performance & power efficiency of firefox on Mac OS!

Edited September 27, 2019 by Flott

[Trik'Stari]

I wish someone who knew how to speak corporate demon speech would convince these companies that they could save a lot of money by just not advertising.

 

Or at least, drastically reducing it down to one person sending out information to reviewers.

[Brooksie359]

18 hours ago, will4623 said:

It's a good time to be a Firefox user.

Yeah I think I might just switch with google killing adblockers. I mainly use adblocker for security reasons. 

[vanished]

Repulsive behaviour on their part.  There are a few reasons I can imagine for them not wanting to allow extensions (walled garden and all that), and while I personally think that none of them are good enough to actually justify disabling them, I can at least respect the intention.  This however I cannot.

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This is an enormous and straight up lie!  I'm absolutely disgusted by such a move, but not that surprised as it's hardly the first time Apple has done this (blatantly lied to customers).  While I don't personally use any of the products in question, I still feel passionately about this issue because I think people deserve better, even if they don't think so or realize it themselves.

[Yeroh]

Just another reason to go for Firefox.

 

I genuinely like Safari for a lot of its unique features, such as link preview with the trackpad, but this is straight up unacceptable. I might even start donating to Mozilla, they're the only ones doing great independent work in the browser market.