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Comment by discordance | Hacker News Reader

I noticed this overnight when uBlock Origin wasn't working. I've been slowly transitioning over to Firefox over the last few months, but still end up in Safari quite often.

This motivates me more to move over to Firefox permanently. Battery life might take a hit, but the philosophical and political motivation is too high not to use Firefox.

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IIRC Mozilla said recently (last week or two) that they had managed to patch the bug responsible for the majority of battery issues on macOS.

Tests showed this finally brought power usage inline with Chrome, but not down to Safari levels.

I can confirm: Been using Firefox for months on my Mac, and it is not draining my battery like it did a few years ago. It used to be very resource hungry, not anymore.

Safari is SO much more efficient than Firefox. I find it to be more performant while also using a lot less juice on my MBP.

I tried Safari for the first time in a while a few days ago and I agree with you. But the amount of ads, videos, popups, and sticky crap all over the screen makes reading web sites impossible. I didn't realize just how bad the web browsing experience had become without an ad blocker. I'm rebuilding my Pihole at the moment so this nonsense will go away soon. But it's really, really bad to be without it.

But you can still use ad-blockers in Safari… it's not like now it's impossible to block ads in Safari…

Yeah, I was on vacation recently and didn’t have my pihole. It was also eye opening for me too.

Before my next trip I want to get a VPN configured so that when I am remote I can 1, access my home network/lab and 2. Take advantage of pihole (not to mention encrypting my traffic)

I'm putting my next pihole on a cloud VPS so I can use it from anywhere. It's an experiment; I want to see how long I can keep it from becoming part of a botnet. Ideas welcome.

It’s totally doable. You want to run a VPN server on the host so that you can connect to it and have your network traffic go through it. You could tunnel all traffic thru the VPN, or only the DNS traffic. Then you could have the pihole bound to the local interface only, not accepting connections from outside that host.

I’m making it sound easier than it is, but it’s still pretty straightforward. There’s actually a doc on the official pihole site that explains how to do this but I haven’t read it completely.

But ads often slowdown browsing significantly and cause unwanted cpu work and network traffic.

Then there is tracking and sometimes even malware...

Safari is aggressively attacking the tracking problem as a code browser feature, and the as blocking capabilities are sufficient for blocking all the ads you need blocked anyway. It just can't do all the other page optimization / CSS stuff to strip out elements completely, so you might have some empty divs or whatever; who cares

I have Pihole on my network doing DNS/ad-blocking.

So just install a content blocker? I don't get what you're trying to say.

Plenty of them out there for iOS and macOS and they work well.

FYI, In the next Firefox release there's a change that should dramatically improve Firefox battery use.

The other issue is that uBlock Origin development on Safari stopped sometime last year. I still prefer Safari, but Firefox is a close second so I'll just switch if I can't find a good enough adblocker for Safari.

And whatever adblock works on mobile Safari (I'm using Refine, but haven't looked at others) is already pretty good.

Why not just move to a content blocker?

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