As far as Mac Safari recommendations, I've tried most of them. Better seems the leanest and most effective for me. I have no relationship with the developer.
From their website:
"Better is hand-crafted by Small Technology Foundation, a tiny two-person-and-one-husky not-for-profit striving for social justice in the digital network age. We curate our own unique blocking rules for Better based on the principles of Ethical Design."
Nice app.
Be aware, Better actually allows most compact, low compute, non-tracking ads. Anyone who wants to serve me respectful ads that don't abuse my privacy or my compute resources are absolutely welcome on my system. Happy to help. Non-respectful ads are not welcome.
While I'm promoting small Indie browser extension makers, I also like the StopTheMadness extension. This kills lots of rude click/function hijacking that is done by many obnoxious web pages. It also stops a lot of tracking code. Again, I have no relationship with the developer.
uBlock origin works fine on Chrome today as it has for years. With their new "no third party cookie" BS we might see it break but until then I don't think they can be so user hostile
If you are in the "I wish Safari blocked ads" boat but don't know where to go, let me recommend an out…
There are a lot of reasonable choices, I've been using Wipr for years. It does a good job of blocking ads and costs about $2. There are macOS and iOS versions, they update their lists, and because of the architecture have no access to your browsing so can never be tempted to start farming you.
(No affiliation, I haven't done an extensive comparison, but this one works and isn't expensive and you can stop worrying about what to do if you do this now.)
Have to agree here. I actually quite like safari, but cant use it due to no uBlock Origin which is unfortunate. uBlock and Facebook Container have made all the difference for me.
I use AdGuard, a content blocker that supports the major ABP lists like EasyList, Fanboy’s, etc. I wish there was a content blocker that support automatic translation of ABP lists into content blocker rules—I’ve been working on one but haven’t found the time to finish it.
To expand on adguard, you can self host their dns blocker via docker. It works really well and IMO a much nicer experience than trying to get pihole perfect.
I installed Magic Lasso and Firefox independently, and also together, and together they were basically perfect.
(It’s been 2 years or so, for all I know, they have both advanced to the point of being sufficient alone - but I did not experiment, since everything just works so well)
I've developed my own blocker for Safari, mostly because I was tired of other blockers breaking too many sites for me. So, it is designed to be less aggressive in filtering.
I've flip-flopped between uBlock and AdGuard for a while now. Generally find AdGuard to be slightly better and has a much nicer UI.
Also has a neat broken site reporting system in it which automatically generates a GitHub issue to fix the filter lists from a simplified form. Automatically prioritises sites via an algorithm, probably their Alexa ranking or something similar.
Not sure how applicable this is to Macs but I found that
blocklists based on the hosts file cover almost all ads. The
only exceptions I encountered were YouTube ads as well as ads
hosted directly on the website, which is pretty rare nowadays.
Does this number includes mobile browsers? Given the big mobile browsers do not have adblockers (or even extensions altogether?), that would explain it.
I don't use uBlock. But I learned how to write chrome extensions and it turned out extremely easy to insert my own CSS and JS snippets to the selected pages. So I just added few URL filters to remove most obnoxious tracking and ads, I added very few CSS edits to the selected websites to remove popups and I added some JS to youtube to remove its ads. Web is pretty fast and usable for me. I did not cut every ad, but I don't often browse new websites and I'm okay with some ads as long as they're not very bad.
The reason I don't use uBlock is because I think that it's overkill for me to run thousands of filters for every website in the world. And also I like the fact that I'm in control of my user agent. For example recently I turned off feature on some website which paused video when I switched to another tab. I did not like that feature, so I disabled corresponding JS handler, simple as that.
I don't use an ad blocker - I feel bad since ad revenue is the only thing most of these sites have (OTOH, I don't run ads on my own blog because I don't like what the ad-supported internet has become).
Almost all of them I assume? Browser ad blocking is much less widespread than people seem to think, otherwise there wouldn't be so many ~trillion dollar companies built around tracking and advertising on the internet.
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