![]() Google Chrome for Mac still supports ad blockers, but it's currently unclear if they'll do so in the future. If users have moved to a new ad blocker that they downloaded from the App Store, then it may not be actually blocking all the ads, as users expect.Īt this point, as many have pointed out, Firefox for Mac may be the only solution for running an ad blocker on macOS these days, while there's no way of using an older ad blocker on iOS, regardless of browser. The bottom line is that there's no way to install a classic Safari ad blocker starting this week, and that Apple is expected to remove or disable old Safari legacy extensions from users' browsers sometime in the future, for good. On the other hand, ads are Google's life blood, and when Google announced updates that limited ad blockers, everyone saw it a secret plan for a big corp to keep its profits intact, rather than an actual security measure, as Google said it was.Īs software engineer Will Lesieutre said this week in a HackerNews comment, Apple's announcement was "totally believable because it's in line with the last 10+ years of their product direction."īut "people are more skeptical of Google's motives because nearly all of their money comes from selling ads, and for all we know they're more concerned about their very very very large piles of cash than they are about browser extension security." The bottom line When Apple rolled out a new content blocking feature to replace the old Safari extensions and said it was for everyone's privacy - as extensions won't be able to access browsing history - everyone believed it. ![]() With a market share of 3.5%, Safari users aren't even in the same galaxy as Chrome and its 65% market lead.įurthermore, there is also the problem of public perception. There was no public pressure on Apple mainly because there aren't really that many Safari users to begin with. In Google's case, the pressure started with extension developers, but it then extended to the public. Unlike in Google's case, where Chrome is based on an open-source browser named Chromium and where everyone gets a voice, everything at Apple is a walled garden, with strict rules.Īpple was never criticized for effectively "neutering" or "killing ad blockers" in the same way Google has been all this year. The reason may have to do with the fact that Apple is known to have a heavy hand in enforcing rules on its App Store, and that developers who generally speak out are usually kicked out. With the exception of a few rare complaints, people generally didn't care that Apple just neutered all Safari ad blockers, a situation that contrasts with what happened to Google in 2019, and the wave of criticism it received. It had fewer rules to apply than before.Īpple was never criticized for doing what Google didn't even doĪt the time, extension developers, including most ad blockers, migrated their code and didn't say a peep. On the other side, when Apple rolled out the new Content Blocker API, it enforced a maximum limit of 50,000 rules for each new extension that wanted to block content inside Safari. The company was immediatelly attacked for trying to "kill ad blockers," and after months of criticism, Google eventually backed down on its initial plan and settled on a higher limit ranging from 90,000 to 120,000, a number that many extension developers, and especially those managing ad blockers, still consider insufficient. Google wanted to limit the maximum rules an extension could pass to Chrome to 30,000, which many Chrome extension developers said was extremely low, and wouldn't even begin to accommodate the likes of ad blockers, parental control or traffic inspection extensions. ![]() Instead, the extension will deploy a set of "content blocking rules" and the browser will do the blocking without the extension seeing any user data. They will limit how extensions intercept and block web requests by preventing the extension from interacting with the web request directly. ![]() In a very simple explanation, the changes that Apple implemented in Safari and the upcoming changes planned for Chrome have taken the same path to the same goal, but with different code and terminology.īoth Chrome and Safari will use a new extensions backend. ![]()
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