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Comment by mtomweb | Hacker News Reader

MacOS is the only market Safari actually competes in and has the same advantage by being the default.

I would actually expect the most likely outcome is Apple would fight hard to build a better browser to stem any losses to other browsers. They'll have at least 2 years to do it, so they can catch up in that time with enough investment.

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Recall how Google gimped Windows Phone support on the web, presumably to advantage their own platform and web services. My fear is that they'd do the same to Safari on iOS. They could break support on iOS, to force users to Chrome, where they can better track and monetize their users.

They definitely have the capital to make it happen. Every time I boot up Safari after a MacOS update, I'm consistently wowed by how little of their revenue actually goes in to making a comfortable, feature-complete browser. It's almost like you're using a different, nerfed internet with Safari, but maybe that's just me being angry that uBlock Origin doesn't work anymore.

There are plenty of ad blockers for Safari, not sure what nerfed experience you're referring to.

This has been debated to death, but there are no ad blockers on Safari that will work as well as uBlock Origin, because Safari doesn't have all of the APIs/hooks exposed that would be necessary to implement uBlock Origin's more advanced features.

It's the same problem that developers were talking about with Chrome's Manifest V3 -- to the point where popular adblockers for Safari like Adguard actually run outside of the browser so that they're not quite as limited as they otherwise would be by Safari's apis.

The nerfed experience of addons only specifying a significantly limited list of blocking rules, giving up being able to autonomously allow or deny each request with arbitrary parameters, surrogate scripts (replacing the original, tracking ones with privacy-friendly reimplementations) and cosmetically alter the webpage (e.g. fixing the layout with missing ads).

Partial source: https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158

And which of those ad blockers are Open Source?

AdGuard

> There are plenty of ad blockers for Safari

And none of them work as well as uBlock Origin on Chrome.

Trust me, I tried. I even paid money to try a few extensions out on Safari in the hopes I would get a better experience, but even that doesn't work.

(As a safari user) I've found running a pihole to be a good solution

Also been trying out this webkit based browser for macos: https://browser.kagi.com (supports ublock origin)

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