uBlock is what's keeping me from switching to Safari (which is so much nicer to use on a Mac)
It seems like most people who use Safari use full system-level ad blockers like Wipr. But I was also Googling around and found some complaints about Wipr, like it taking forever to be updated to block YouTube ads when they switch how they're displayed, or not being as good at getting around ad-block detection on certain sites.
I use AdGuard and it works pretty well. Well enough that Safari is still the superior experience on my Mac for general browsing, especially when it comes to performance and battery life.
I actually use Chrome, Firefox, and Safari on a daily basis, so I have some pretty solid annecdata that Safari is the best experience.
I've recently switched to macOS and Safari with Wipr. I don't see much difference to my Firefox setup with AdNauseam (uBlock Origin) before. More on the contrary - my selected lists were very aggressive and I had various sites where I had to disable uBlock to see them properly. With Safari and Wipr, everything seems to just work.
As a direct fork, it’s currently 2282 commits ahead, 586 commits behind your uBlock. That amounts to about the commits since uBlock 1.29.0 - which is exactly the version they’re claiming to use.
If you can afford it, I'd suggest switching to AdNauseam (https://adnauseam.io). They're using the same uBlock Origin engine, but ads are downloaded and clicked on in the background. This way you still generate revenue for site owners.
But since this extension is banned from the Chrome Web Store, you'll have to install it manually there. On Firefox it's available from their add-on store.
This is based on a misunderstanding of how ads work and does harm.
If this silently clicks ads in the background the click rate goes up but the goal action (buying, signing up) remains at 0 which smartprices the ads and tanks the value of the ads for the real clickthroughs.
If you must block ads just use uBlock Origin so you are treated like your visit doesn't exist.
A deeper question is it moral to consume content and block the ads. Wouldn't that be the same as pirating a movie? (not that there is anything wrong with pirating). Are there people who would block ads and complain about people pirating, or even stealing from a store if you can get away with it.
Is it moral to conflate "advertisement" with code running on my device without my express permission? Tracking my behavior across the web? Selling their profiles to entities with which I have no direct connection? Dog wagging by changing what I see across sites to get better conversion rates?
Doing what I can to prevent all that doesn't present me with any moral quandary. Advertisers certainly don't follow any sort of moral imperative.
Advertising is not inherently bad but modern web advertising is ridiculous.
Free newspaper I want to add. Nobody is forcing companies to publish their content freely accessible.
I don’t know how many of you people remember the Internet around 2000. People actually paid to be able to publish their stuff on the Internet. Because they wanted to. Without any intent on getting revenue. Unthinkable, I know!
Browsing the web is equivalent of your butler shouting to another butler to please GET /some/page, and the other butler then kindly replying with a document.
Theft requires the action to not be voluntary, but a web server replying with a page is free to reject my request. It is entirely moral.
Ads are inherently immoral and it's ok to watch a movie for free as nothing is stolen in that case. Ads are immoral because the website gets access to the biggest distribution channel in history - the internet, access to the financial system, a huge educated society and all this for free, and for this opportunity it sneakily builds a profile of visitors and sells that info to whoever pays. On top of that it dares to annoy visitors with tasteless visuals. Imagine someone wants to start a business and is given an opportunity be seen by hundreds of potentials clients: they come to his party curious to see what's there, but he secretly takes pictures of all visitors, records who talks to whom, takes photos of contact lists in their phones, and then sells all that to the highest bidder. On top of that he suddenly starts loud tv ads on a huge bright lcd screen to feature some junk paid by nobody knows who. Only then, after wasting everyone's time and profiting off their personal data, the host dares to pitch his business idea. So yeah, if a website treats me like trash, I'll do the same in return.
Was it moral from advertisers to pervert the web protocols so that advertisements can be forced upon us? HTTP still allow us to choose not to fetch content based on the URL. If advertisers do not like it they are free to invent their own web.
Advertisements cannot be the price to pay for the modern internet because the old internet had more value.
So, an adblock should blank the entire page, no, scratch that, back() me immediately? That actually sorta makes sense. Not talking about morals, just practically.
That would create a subset of "no attention stealing" web.
But actually ads placed in separate elements are convenient in a way . It would be much much worse if the ad industry switched to a sponsored content to invade that area.
This seemed really interesting, so I clicked through to their FAQ.
> Does AdNauseam's automatic Ad-clicking create billable events for advertisers?
> It depends on the advertising business model and the degree of effort they are willing to put into filtering. Some might, others would not.
So it seems like the extension only "generates revenue for site owners" if it's either
- small enough for ad selling companies to not know it exists (and sophisticated enough to defeat their baseline filtering measures) or
- large enough for ad selling companies to notice it exists and sophisticated enough to defeat active attempts to filter clicks from AdNauseam specifically
I don't know how this arms race usually turns out, but it seems like there could be a chance that this is just a uBlock Origin that consumes more bandwidth.
Yeah they didn't mention the stated purpose of AdNauseam, which is explicitly hostile to ad networks and advertisers.
EDIT: From their paper:
"The second goal is to provide a means of proactive engagement, allowing users an avenue for expression of their dissatisfaction with current advertising mechanisms to those in control of such systems. In the case of AdNauseam, this expression has an interventional aspect, as the software actively attempts to disrupt the economic model that drives advertising surveillance"
Right, I’ll often make design choices to remove a whole div I don’t need. Your most recent stories I might be interested in that takes up 20% of my screen? No thanks!
On news websites, beyond the typical heavy JS ads, uBlock is super useful for removing 1P static ads (e.g. New Yorker "subscribe and get a free tote" linked to as a newyorker.com image from next to an article) as well as things like sticky title bars and "top articles" widgets to declutter the reading experience.
I don't use Facebook much any more but a lot of the noise on there can be blocked (the ads which are conveniently labelled as sponsored, and "suggested for you").
They've seemingly gone out of their way to make this difficult by putting each letter of "Sponsored" in its own div, but you can make a filter based on the aria-label instead.
It seems like most people who use Safari use full system-level ad blockers like Wipr. But I was also Googling around and found some complaints about Wipr, like it taking forever to be updated to block YouTube ads when they switch how they're displayed, or not being as good at getting around ad-block detection on certain sites.