Apple Neutered Ad Blockers In Safari, But Unlike Chrome, Users Didn't Say a Thing (zdnet.com) 94
sharkbiter shares a report from ZDNet: Over the course of the last year and a half, Apple has effectively neutered ad blockers in Safari, something that Google has been heavily criticized all this year. But unlike Google, Apple never received any flak, and came out of the whole process with a reputation of caring about users' privacy, rather than attempting to "neuter ad blockers." The reasons may be Apple's smaller userbase, the fact that changes rolled out across years instead of months, and the fact that Apple doesn't rely on ads for its profits, meaning there was no ulterior motive behind its ecosystem changes.
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. It's either obey or get out. 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. Apple was never criticized for effectively "neutering" or "killing ad blockers" in the same way Google has been all this year. In Google's case, the pressure started with extension developers, but it then extended to the public. There was no public pressure on Apple mainly because there aren't really that many Safari users to begin with. With a market share of 3.5%, Safari users aren't even in the same galaxy as Chrome and its 65% market lead.
Furthermore, there is also the problem of public perception. 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. 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.
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. It's either obey or get out. 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. Apple was never criticized for effectively "neutering" or "killing ad blockers" in the same way Google has been all this year. In Google's case, the pressure started with extension developers, but it then extended to the public. There was no public pressure on Apple mainly because there aren't really that many Safari users to begin with. With a market share of 3.5%, Safari users aren't even in the same galaxy as Chrome and its 65% market lead.
Furthermore, there is also the problem of public perception. 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. 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.
Apple's new slogan... (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple's new slogan: "Demand less"
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
It's a phone. But feel free to have an inability to make calls because of malware loaded because your OS isn't autoupdating because Samsung doesn't support it anymore. Sounds great. Meanwhile, I just want it to work.
The first iPhone predated cell cameras and 3G, so... you know. And the iPad had a calendar.
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Not anymore, really. It's getting closer and closer to being a general purpose computer that happens to be compact and make calls. I very rarely use mine to actually make calls.
At this point you can plug a monitor, keyboard and mouse into one, and almost have a desktop.
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Maybe you use your phone as a computer. I don't. I've mostly use a dumbphone, but I'll take whatever hand-me-down that's still supported people want to give me.
And it's fine, different strokes for different folks. Just don't act like most people are plugging in monitors, keyboards, and mice. Remember, there was a phone that could, in dock mode like that, run a full (x64?) Linux disto. It failed in the market.
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Companies also experimented with tablets and laptops well before the tech became practical for the average user. The early attempts weren't practical, but eventually the problems got solved.
With USB C, you can plug a keyboard, mouse, and *two* 4K monitors through the same connector. Add to that we have phones with 12GB RAM now, and you have something with more capability that a not that old desktop in your pocket.
The tech is already here, just rather expensive. Pretty much all that's left is time, and Andro
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> The first iPhone predated cell cameras and 3G, so...
What kind of revisionist history are you pushing? Both of those claims are bs.
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The iPhone 3 famously wasn't 3G.
The first iPhone did have a 2 MP camera though.
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EDGE had just come out when the first iPhone dropped. I mean, maybe 3G technically been announced, but EDGE was still being rolled out to major metropolitan areas.
And I forgot the first iPhone had a camera.
Re: New? (Score:1)
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AT&T started their EDGE rollout in 2005, and did not have 3G well in place until 2009 (1 year after the iPhone got 3G support).
Re: New? (Score:2)
The iPhone does not predate cameras on phones. My treo, prior to iPhone release had two app stores, full screen, full motion video, full organizer support, and a modern just as fast as the iPhone.
The only real improvements were a real-ish browser, and gps-ish map. Unlike the turn by turn directions my treo had, the iPhone only had coarse location support. It was a map and you could load it over the internet.
Iphones were not particularly capable phones.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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If I had looked 20 years into the future from 1999 (Score:2)
...and read this post, I think my brain would've exploded.
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Came here to say essentially this - I only use Safari now for things that block my viewing when I'm using a real browser.
This is much less news than when iOS10 artificially and arbitrarily limited hosts file sizes.
This, combined with the loss of the analog headphone jack, has simply solidified my decision never to purchase another apple device.
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Came here to say essentially this - I only use Safari now for things that block my viewing when I'm using a real browser.
This is much less news than when iOS10 artificially and arbitrarily limited hosts file sizes.
This, combined with the loss of the analog headphone jack, has simply solidified my decision never to purchase another apple device.
Good to hear, now i can sleep at night.
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Good to hear, now i can sleep at night.
Yeah, me too. Shit... I was worried there for a moment.
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True.
This post is shorter.
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It is also likely that the remaining people who cared simply voted with their feet and left safari...
I did this. The second the Safari 13 preview ditched all my useful extensions, only offering the dozen or so pathetic 'apps' as alternatives (very few of which provided any similar functionality), it was clear Apple had no intention of supporting anything resembling 'useful' extensions on Safari - clearly doesn't fit into their 'we must have 30% of everything' mentality.
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It is also likely that the remaining people who cared simply voted with their feet and left safari...
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Can you use anything else on iOS?
Admittedly it's been a long time since I looked, but it used to be that all iOS browsers had to use the Apple rendering engine and whatever limited extensibility it offered. Some bollocks about not allowing programmable apps.
Summary is bullshit. Limited to 50,000 rules (99.9 (Score:5, Informative)
"neutered and blockers" means they set a limit of 50,000 domains or patterns checked / blocked. That is, an ad blocker can have up to 50,000 rules it can check for each item on the page, then it has to make a fucking decision and either block it or allow it to load.
20 rules will eliminate 99% of ads, so 50,000 is WAY past the point of diminishing returns. Checking 100,000 different rules for each of the 50 resources on a page would be 5 MILLION checks to load a single page. Apple decided that was a bit excessive.
Your comment is bullshit. (Score:4, Informative)
20 rules does not even cover one ad type on one server of one advertiser. ...
Like the advertisers didn't use as much variation as possible to circumvent ad blockers
Go ahead and magically reduce uBlock's default subscribed lists to your 20 rules. We'll surf one day long. 100 pages/sites. And every time it shows an ad, you get to meat hammer your balls off. :P
Hell, reduce it to only 50000, and have 365 people surf for just one day.
Your comment is absurd (Score:3, Interesting)
Hell, reduce it to only 50000, and have 365 people surf for just one day.
How does Ghostery continue to work just fine in Safari I wonder for me and many other users, when you seem to claim you need 10 billion trillion rules just to detect a single ad for more than a day?
Maybe ad blocker writers are a little more clever than you are, and are also a little more aware the heat death of the universe presents a natural cap.
TLDR: Ad blockers work in Safari therefore you are ignorant.
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TLDR: Ad blockers work in Safari therefore you are ignorant.
True ignorance is saying adblockers work or don't work without defining the criteria on which you judge them. If I turn off my cable modem I consider that to be a 100% working Adblocker as well. Personally I don't use Safari anymore given the number of pages which don't seem to load properly. But hey, no ads amirite?
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Ghostery doesn't even support Safari any more. You have to use "Ghostery Lite" [ghostery.com] which is far less powerful and offers less protection.
They selected rules that give the visual appearance of working well while removing the ones more focused on privacy and security.
Over half with two rules: Facebook and Google (Score:3)
Over half of online ads (57%) can be blocked by blocking Google and Facebook.
Add Amazon and you're at about 60%
With 200,000 rules, you might see one ad a day.
With 50,000 rules, you might see one ad a day.
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It's fairly simple to block almost everything with uMatrix by just enabling "sane" defaults, and no additional rules.
* * * block
* * css allow
* * frame block
* * image allow
* 1st-party * allow
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Its the users computer and their own extension to load...
Re: Summary is bullshit. Limited to 50,000 rules ( (Score:2)
We're headed for Ma Bell all over again. You pay (and pay and pay) for your phone, but you never own it.
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Their computer, their browser, their extension, their time, their internet to gui with after all ads get blocked/removed.
Re:Summary is bullshit. Limited to 50,000 rules (9 (Score:5, Informative)
It is bullshit. I'm typing this with the most recent update to Safari and all my adblockers work fine. Even that text box image (that he got from another site) is bullshit: it applies to old versions of adblock and Ghostery that were replaced months ago when the last big Apple updates came out. The old extensions don't work but the new versions work just fine.
The article is click-bait for a strange crowd of PC users who love to read and talk about various Apple limitations (that they only know about second-hand). Occasionally I'm told by one of these people that my Mac can't do such-and-such that it can, in fact, do. Or that my iPhone handcuffs me because I have to use the app store for apps (something I consider a feature, not a glitch).
Not like it matters. Firefox is currently a better browser than Chrome or Safari. I just use Safari for sites with logins because it has all my passwords stored and it works well enough that it's not worth saving everything on Firefox.
Re:Summary is bullshit. Limited to 50,000 rules (9 (Score:5, Interesting)
Ghostery no longer exists for Safari, only a Lite version: https://www.ghostery.com/blog/... [ghostery.com]
uBlock Origin is no longer available for Safari: https://github.com/gorhill/uBl... [github.com]
The version on the store is the last working version and isn't being updated any more (last update 23rd of April 2018): https://github.com/el1t/uBlock... [github.com]
Privacy Badger is not available for Safari.
What you have left are some reduced functionality ad blockers that concentrate on cosmetic blocking rather than protecting your privacy.
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They dropped support for legacy extensions that were arguably more powerful than the new content blocking framework which is basically a list of links bundled as an app.
For example, a popular ad blocker uBlock Origin no longer works on Safari 13. Read here [github.com] for explanation and recommendations.
uBlock Origin was ported for Safari in 2016, and was updated regulary (mostly changes from the main project) until 2018 when development completley stopped. Since then Apple has begun phasing out Safari extensions as extensions, and has instead been implenting a new extensions framework which is extremley limited in adblocking functions, only allowing "content blockers", which are just links bundled as an app which Safari enforces. From Safari 12 / macOS Mojave, old legacy Safari extensions were still allowed, but came with warnings saying that they will slow down your browsing (they infact won't, or at least not noticably). Safari also recently shut their Extension Gallery, instead redirecting it to the mac app store. Though it is still curently possible to install uBlock Origin by downloading the extension from Github (edit: must follow these instructions, it will not be starting from Safari 13 / macOS Catalina, when the legacy entension API will be fully deprecated.
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If only there was some kind of data structure that would avoid having to walk through 5 million rules looking for a match...
:) thank you (Score:2)
That made me smile, thank you.
You are of course correct, it can be done in less than linear time. At the cost of some extra memory, but not too much.
So no more Safari YouTube viewing (Score:2)
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AdBlock seems to work just fine. I don't see any ads on YouTube. (Safari 13)
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AdBlock seems to work just fine. I don't see any ads on YouTube. (Safari 13)
I just checked AGAIN. You are right, so what the hell is this article talking about?
uBlock Origin (Score:2)
Still works on Chrome, without it the majority of content useless. The content many URLs load makes the page a resource hog and/or excessively slow. I just can't imagine not limiting referring unwanted resources.
AdGuard people (Score:3)
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This.
To be honest, as someone who used Firefox up until their last major fuckup & now exclusively uses Safari, I'm more pissed off about:
(a) the translate extension I used no longer working - except, strangely, on a few sites (e.g. electrotanya) where it detects the page I'm on is already in English. Wtf?;
(b) the fact that Apple's 'Safari Extensions' page is fucking useless, doesn't show all available extensions, and lacks any sort of ability to search beyond 'Cmd-F'; and
(c) a few websites which go "oh
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When was the last major fuck-up of FF and what did they fuck up? Mine works just how I want it to work.
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AdGuard was neutered by Apple: https://adguard.com/en/blog/ad... [adguard.com]
AdGuard now recommends their separate app that does a MITM on all your internet traffic in order to restore the lost functionality.
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An ad blocker in your browser only affects traffic in the browser. AdGaurd's solution is to affect everything on the computer.
From +2 to -1 troll? Didn't get the humor? (Score:1)
Or a #triggered drone with mod points.
Sorry, drone: Facts are facts. Being in denial does not make it a troll.
Safari users don't care? (Score:2)
Let's break this down.
Desktop Safari users make up less than 5% of internet users.
Probably less than 5% of internet users generally use an ad blocker.
Of the remaining Safari users that use an ad blocker, probably less than 5% noticed or cared enough that their ad blocker stopped working to make a fuss. Those that did care probably have switched to Firefox.
Who Ergo, no significant fuss was generated.
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Probably less than 5% of internet users generally use an ad blocker.
I'd predict waaaaaay more than 5%, unless you're stating that the demise of human intelligence is already upon us.
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Donald Trump is the president of the US. Any you are wondering if the demise of human intelligence is already upon us?
Reminder, Donald Trump is president.
combinatorics (Score:1)
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.
It was a security measure for Googles profits. Only a fool would think otherwise.
Re: Hrm.... (Score:2)
Well, they're complaining now (Score:2)
Many, like myself, have been discussing what happened after we installed Safari 13. All of our extensions are gone. And if we reinstall Safari 12 it will not let us reinstall those extensions at all. Talk about non-backward compatibility. :P
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Install Ghostery Lite. It's all you need. Adblock Plus works, too. Your extensions are just old and need to be replaced with newer ones.
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Your extensions are just old and need to be replaced with newer ones.
Please suggest an alternative for Stylish.
I really miss that one.
And that is why I run Chrome on Mac O/S (Score:2)
And that is why I run Chrome on Mac O/S
However, it is getting to the point where it doesn't really matter anymore. If you want to access content, sites have javascript to detect ad blockers and make you pause them or turn them off in order to view the content.
Ads vs. Blockers is an arms race and the blockers will always loose.
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Ironically, I have run into some sites where if I block the javascript on the main URL, it blocks the paywall.
No one believes Google because you are the product (Score:3)
No one believes Google because you are the product.
Let's face it, Google is our useful, smart, and insanely creepy friend that knows all of our secrets.
Googles job is to sell ads. The more Google knows about you, no matter how Google anonymizes your data, the more ads they can sell and higher conversion rates mean MORE PROFIT!
Google is our creepy friend and always will be.
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People believe Apple because they are stupid.
Even Microsoft is more transparent and honest than Apple, and always has been.
I used to have a Bondi blue G3. In revision one of this board Apple used a crappy CMD IDE chip that had problems doing UDMA to most devices. Apple claimed these machines would do UDMA but of course they wouldn't to most devices, so that turned out to essentially be fraud. In the old techinfo library there was an article about it in which Apple told you to either buy an IDE card, or buy
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Another way of looking at it is that both Apple and Google came to the same conclusion regarding performance enhancements.
Google announced it publicly, listened to the criticism and backed down.
Apple just did it and told anyone who complained to go fuck themselves.
Article confuses iOS and macOS (Score:2)
That article is a mess. It jumps between iOS and macOS.
Desktop: chrome 55%-70%, safari 3%-13% (the article quotes 3.5%)
Mobile: chrome 60%-65%, safari 20%-25%
On my iPhone I'm using the app "Wipr" as the ad-blocker, and I haven't seen ads for ages on it.
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That article is a mess. It jumps between iOS and macOS.
Indeed - it made it sound like there were full (old-style Safari Mac) extensions on iOS, when it was only content blockers that's been supported on iOS.
TenFourFox (Score:2)
Seriously though, TenFourFox runs astonishingly well on a late G4 or any G5. I'm a little blown away by how well it works considering some of the hardware I'm running it on is older than Vista *puke*. I mean Vista *puuuuke*. I mean Windows 8's grandpa.
Example block list (Score:2)
Here is the block list for Ka-Block!, in case you were looking for some practice examples.
https://github.com/dgraham/Ka-... [github.com]
WIPR works just fine (Score:1)
Of course (Score:1)
Or at least they know that Apple knows what's good for them.
A few reasons. (Score:2)
1: Fans who demand this sort of control from their browsers moved on.
2: Apple likely "sanitized" even the appearance of dissent.
3: The remainders are hardcore Apple Sheeple.
uBlock Origin works fine (Score:1)
Why is it not really an option? This makes no sense.
I'm running uBlock Origin 1.16.0 on Safari at this very moment on this very page and ZDNet li
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Simple reason (Score:2)
No matter the religion, the devotees never question the decisions of the priesthood.
Chrome not a walled garden? (Score:1)
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
So why is Chrome not a walled gard
Oh Come On, Out with it Already (Score:1)
Nobody uses it to browse (Score:2)
Its only use is to place a link on the home screen.
I'm Using Safari Right Now (Score:2)
Question for Apple users (Score:2)
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Safari 13 was released a few days ago. All your points are still valid, however.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_(web_browser)#Safari_13
Another part of the problem (Score:1)
ZDNet hit piece (Score:2)
Oh, I said plenty (Score:1)
Then I started up Firefox only to notice that Tridactyl is no longer available in the extensions database.
Finally installed the beta from file from GitHub, but boy, was that a shitty day.
What is going on with all the browsers??
Anyone with a clue (Score:2)
Anyone with a clue already moved to a better browser, likely Chrome which is what I see on most macs. The kind of person who uses the default browser that came with their computer isn't going to install extensions in the first place. I didn't even know Safari supported ad blockers or other extensions.