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The lack of support is in the other direction - Safari doesn't support uBlock Origin anymore. The only way to block ads is with Apple's Content Blocking API, which is fundamentally not how uBlock Origin works.


Interesting, didn't know that - why wasn't there the same kind of outcry as for Chrome API changes?


Safari lets extensions precompile a list of patterns to block and then it does the actual blocking. The extension never sees your browsing history or network requests.


Sounds a lot like what Chrome is bringing in.


Chrome has a limit on the amount of the items in the list.

Originally, Google wanted to max at 30k items, but after the outry, they increased it to 150k.

For comparison, my uBlock has currently 101k of net filters and 49k cosmetic filters.


Safari also has a limit, and it's low enough that plugin developers have had to split their work into multiple parallel plugins or even into standalone macOS applications.


I guess because Safari is relatively unimportant in terms of market share. Not totally unimportant, but not quite the same league.


Probably because of lack of usage of Safari. It was covered in some circles: https://adguard.com/en/blog/safari-adblock-extensions.html


I'm running uBlock Origin 1.16 on Safari 12.1.1 right now, unless I'm mistaken.


Apple hasn't completed the Extension Gallery deprecation process, but it will be entirely unusable with Safari 13.


Ah, thanks, damn. Might be time to give Firefox another shot.


Pardon my ignorance, but I installed ublock via the App Store in safari and it seems to work fine, am I mistaken?

Edit: I see it’s ublock, not ublock origin. What’s the difference?


uBlock is an unmaintained fork of uBlock Origin: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-is-comp...

If it's in the App Store, it's not even a fork, it's just some piece of software using the "uBlock" name.


Interesting. How do they differ fundamentally?


uBlock Origin uses the WebExtension API that is common to Chromium/Firefox. Going forward, Safari for iOS/macOS will only support Apple's Content Blocking API.




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