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by breakall 971 days ago
i love ublock origin and have used it for years. i recently migrated to macos and was disappointed to find that ublock origin doesn’t work with safari.

what’s the best ad-blocking option for safari on macos?

9 comments

The first thing that came to mind was "switch to Firefox". Other than that, I have nothing to recommend.
I use Firefox with uBlock Origin on the Mac and it works great, but for Safari the best option I've found is AdGuard (https://adguard.com). However, it is nowhere near as effective as uBlock Origin since Safari did the Manifest V3 thing.
> since Safari did the Manifest V3 thing.

More accurately, Safari removed support for webRequest BlockingResponse in 2019. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

This was unrelated to Manifest V3, and in fact Safari has not deprecated Manifest V2. Manifest V3 does remove support for webRequest BlockingResponse in Chrome, but I believe not in Firefox.

I currently use 1blocker(paid version) and it seems to be working pretty well compared to Firefox with ublock. I use it both on iOS and macOS.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/1blocker-ad-blocker/id13655310...

It works great, but doesn't work against YouTube's anti-adblock yet.
I heard good things about Wipr (paid product) but don't use it myself on OSX.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wipr/id1320666476?mt=12

1Blocker already mentioned, but it is is absolutely fantastic.

The iOS version also blocks in-app trackers (in other apps, outside of Safari) and YouTube app ads via its firewall feature.

There's a webkit based browser called Orion that I've been trying out that supports chrome extensions. That's the closest thing I think.
Orion has issues loading uBlock Origin on new tabs, see: https://orionfeedback.org/d/718-ublock-origin-doesnt-work-so...
Why not just use Firefox? It's available on macOS.
Firefox has poor battery life on macos.
That is a thing of distant past. It runs beautifully natively on M1/M2 chips and has no noticeable difference in power consumption vs Safari.
Not the case anymore, even on pre-M1 Macs.
But then again we have to buy apple anyhow
Little Snitch, a proprietary firewall, subscribed to some ad blocking lists can block surveillance system-wide