People should be way more upset at the fact that Safari adblocking today is still inferior to even MV3 Google Chrome. Apple's implementation of declarativeNetRequest was semi-broken until the very latest iOS 18.6.

Apple can do the bare minimum, years after everyone else, and barely get called out. The Reality Distortion Field is the enemy.

Also funny that other devs had the gall to make people pay (sometimes subscriptions!) for Safari adblockers inferior to the free adblockers on any other browser.

The release notes mentioning this: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-not...

Not too many sources I could find other than https://matisyahu.blog/2025/07/31/and-it-is-raining-again/ - but apparently the bug was so bad that any adblocker attempting to use declarativeNetRequest could break all Cloudflare websites for the user.

In the wake of Google finally sounding the death knells of Manifest V2, it's good to see Apple's at least making progress towards... parity with Google's MV3 feature set? Not the privacy leadership that Apple's known for, but progress is progress.

Screw Chrome; both Safari and Chrome are inferior to Firefox' adblocking toolkit

And for the record Ublock Origin used to have a Safari extension. But that was forced to be phased out a couple of OS updates ago for reasons I can't remember.

In any case, as someone who will not touch Google's spyware browser with a ten-foot pole, it's nice to have a flagship alternative to Firefox that does decent adblocking.

I agree with you regarding how Apple can do the bare minimum and barely get called out. But the fact is, I don't know of anything who's using declarativeNetRequest on Safari. The ecosystem of Safari blocking is centered around the legacy technology of content blockers from 2015. And the legacy technology works well enough that there's no pressure for either Apple or adblocker developers to adopt the new thing.

What’s the alternative? Using an Android phone with all of Google’s surveillance? A windows laptop with bad battery life, bloatware, and Microsoft’s increasingly bad dark pattern abuse? I feel like no matter what, consumers are screwed.

> The Reality Distortion Field is the enemy.

Don't get me started on apple's "privacy is a right" marketing nonsense.

for all intents and purposes, it does not apply to your phone.

Can you firewall your phone? Can you figure out what is executing? Can you figure out what an app does or who it contacts?

I imagine Apple has 20 billion reasons annually why not to enhance adblocking.

Apple's software is generally low quality with more bugs and less features than equivalent linux/oss software. There is a long list of 5, 10 - year old, well-known bugs that apple simply ignores. They know their userbase is built off of marketing and 'design', not product quality.

> Also funny that other devs had the gall to make people pay (sometimes subscriptions!) for Safari adblockers inferior to the free adblockers on any other browser.

That's absolutely perfect, and fits into the typical apple fangirl pattern that can be readily seen on hackernews - pseudo-technical people promoting some closed cute-looking macos app that's just objectively worse existing OSS alternatives.

I find it analogous to when financially successful people in their mid-life crisis stage decide to buy a 'nice' car, while not having any interest in cars previously. They invariably seem to end up with the the most flashy/marketed car, even though that car is objectively worse than another car for half the price. They will extol the car's virtue in a way that sounds like they are literally reading off of a marketing brochure, and actual car people just laugh at them.

That’s funny, I remember the only way to block ads on my Android phone back many years ago was to root it. I was thrilled how easy it was to block ads on the iPhone when I switched.

The solution is trivial. Don't make Apple applications, don't use Apple products. Build for open protocols. Otherwise, go through life as if Apple didn't exist.

Walled gardens are an abomination.