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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

Their new proposal for blocking ads is exactly the same as the idea Apple offers with Safari, and it blocks ads just fine.

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UBlock Origin, UMatrix, Privacy Badger, Decentraleyes, and HTTPS Everywhere are all not available on Safari, in part because the APIs they rely on aren't available.

I'm not sure why people make the claim that Safari is just as good at blocking ads as Firefox and Chrome. It's not. The extension options on Safari are comparatively quite limited, in no small part because of technical decisions like this.

I use UBlock on Safari. It’s there.

I'm on a Mac and just checked the Safari extension store. The only extension I see for Ublock is a fork of Ublock Origin called Ublock Safari. It hasn't been updated in a year, and is thousands of commits behind the official version.

It also isn't distributed by Gorhill, even though the extension lists him as the author in the extension store. In fact, none of this information is listed on the extension page itself.

I'm not sure the extension you're using is what you think it is -- I would be at least mildly cautious about installing it.

See also this issue (https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/145) on Ublock Safari's Github filled with people complaining that the extension doesn't work and that Safari's tech restrictions mean that there aren't suitable alternatives.

There was a very big thread about this, it's nothing like Apple. The limits are much smaller on the amount of things you can put in a blocklist.

Even if they end up implementing Apple-style simple blocking, they said at the beginning that they would adjust the limits. Most recently, they said the limit would be 150k, which is three times the number Apple allows. https://blog.chromium.org/2019/06/web-request-and-declarativ...

So it's actually a lot like Apple, just with different limits?

Emphasis on idea; IIRC, previous threads have pointed out that Apple hasn't put a limit on their API, or has made the limit much larger.

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