[chickenthirty]

uBlock Origin is great but doesn't work on Safari, which a lot of people use since Chrome is an incredible battery hog and Firefox is significantly slower on Mac.

None of the choices of content blockers in Safari successfully block the majority of ads on the internet.

Furthermore, it's not just about the surfaced ads. Even if you use uBlockOrigin, search engines like Google optimize for ad clicking, which will affect the search result ranking even if you have ads blocked. As a result, search quality has been steadily decreasing over the past decade (there have been hundreds of highly ranked HN discussions on this in the past).

Finally, uBlockOrigin is an amazing tool developed by 1 person. There is always the chance that, in the future, there are developments in browsers or ad-serving technologies that render it obsolete (e.g if Google decides to make a breaking change to the Chrome Extension API, like Safari did). In that case, it would be worthwhile to have alternatives.

[mi100hael]

This is changing in the next release of Safari. They will support the standard WebExtensions API so Firefox/Chrome extensions will be easily portable.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/25/apple-will-let-you-port-go...

[thombles]

According to uBlock Origin's developer it is not enough https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/hdz0bo/will_u...

[EricE]

1Blocker on Safari has been comparable to ublock origin for some time now (and really excels on iOS - how I found them). I say "has" because recently Google changed something with Youtube and it isn't 100% effective against YouTube preroll ads - but other than that it's been just as good as ublock origin.

[imustbeevil]

I totally agree, and there are already multiple options on both desktop and mobile for different adblockers.

As to the search quality decrease, that's definitely more of a reason to desire an alternative than seeing ads is.

[chickenthirty]

Yeah, I think the search quality problem is often brought up here on HN because we're mostly engineers here, but article writers seem to always talk about the visible ads problem since it's easier to explain to non-technical users.

[freediver]

We are building a Mac Webkit-based browser with web extensions support (including uBlock). if you want to try our alpha release feel free to get in touch.