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by azalemeth 1730 days ago
For me, once Apple made that decision, I started migrating away from Safari, and I haven't tried your product. I note that it does have a pro subscription option -- which I'm not opposed to -- but I do also note that this seems to be much more common than the "donationware" licensing model of most other browser extensions.

Out of curiosity, can Magic Lassoo present a detailed list of domain connection attempts by category, i.e. do anything like uMatrix does? The thing that keeps me on FF, even on MacOS (aside from warm fuzzy open source feelings) is that I really think the extension ecosystem is the best -- uMatrix, greasemonkey and the ilk are brilliant. I like Safari's isolated private browsing mode most of the time, and I like its dev tools. But the adblock situation is just so much better on FF; it makes the web usable again whilst respecting my privacy ideals. I really like being able to say 'Thou shalt not set thine cookie and contact all of these domains via an XHR request' and the site just...continuing to work.

1 comments

No matter what all these adblocker advertisements tell you here on HN: Safari only allows these extensions to have a single blocklist and then your choice is whether to enable or disable the adblocker extension, with all its fixed and non-dynamic rules, on the website in question. From that perspective, Safari adblockers are virtually identical, simply because they are all using the same interface and (I would suspect) resell blocklists you get to use for free elsewhere.

It's people selling you a subscription product that is vastly inferior to any free extension on Firefox (not on iOS obv) and the same discussion has been had many times before.

I mean, I don't want to be a negative nancy here, but it does get annoying with these ads that seemingly have lost all perspective of how bad adblocking on Safari truly is.

Not exactly, you can have multiple blocklists limited to 50k entries apiece. Many Safari content blockers support that.

Safari content blocking (and thus Chrome v3 manifest blocking) basically works OK at blocking ads today. The problem is this is an arms race, and as the advertising agencies come up with inventive ways to evade these strictly controlled content blocks, they have no real way to adjust.

At that point we'll need to rely on Apple or Google to add new features specifically to support blocking ads. Google seems particularly unlikely to do that. To say the least.

And even if they do, there will be long periods before new browser releases are available with those features, and then the blocker developers need to support them.