Adblock Plus for Safari Beta released · 2014-01-21 15:56 by Sebastian Noack
Install Adblock Plus for Safari
I spent the past months porting Adblock Plus to Safari. And by now, we’ve got something that is stable enough to release as a beta. Adblock Plus for Safari uses mostly the same codebase as Adblock Plus for Chrome/Opera. So it has the same features and every improvement we do in the future for either browser extension will automatically land in the extension for the other browsers.
To achieve this I added an abstraction layer to the code of Adblock Plus for Chrome/Opera. This way most of the code is browser-agnostic and only the abstraction layer needs to know the APIs provided by the respective browser. That was actually quite a challenge, since Safari has a very limited API.
Adblock Plus for Safari is compatible with following versions of Safari:
- Safari 5.1 (works, but will break functionality on some websites due to a WebKit bug, usually affects image magnifiers)
- Safari 6.0
- Safari 6.1
- Safari 7.0 (works, but has still some issues, see below)
However it is still a beta, so here is what doesn’t work, yet:
- Popups aren’t blocked.
- The number of ads blocked for the current page will sometimes not be reset when navigating to a new page (Safari 7.0 only).
- Icon popup contents will sometimes not update when loading a page into a new tab (Safari 7.0 only).
Beside that Safari’s extension API is more limited than those of other browsers and therefore:
- Requests issued by third-party plugins like Flash can’t be blocked (however we found a way to still block video ads on YouTube).
- XHR requests can’t be blocked.
If you find other issues please report them on the forum (registration is not necessary) or consider contributing.
Kenny · 2014-01-25 18:52 · #
Awesome! Thanks for the hard work you guys have been doing. Quick question, will this beta version update in the background with safari?
Reply from Wladimir Palant:
Yes, it will update automatically.
James · 2014-01-26 12:05 · #
Thanks for working on this guys.
Unfortunately youtube ads aren’t blocked. There don’t even appear to be less of them. Such a shame as that is the entire reason I’m so keen on getting ABP for Safari :(
Hopefully this can be fixed or I may have to concede and switch to a different browser.
Reply from Sebastian Noack:
YouTube video ads should be blocked for the first video. However when you click on another video, in the sidebar or within the flash player, we can’t block ads for that video.
If what you have experienced is even less efficient than that, please report a bug on the forum. Please include the steps to reproduce and the version of Safari you are using, into the bug report.
However, due to the lack of a proper request blocking API, blocking ads within Flash will always be less efficient on Safari than with other browsers, like Chrome and Firefox.
James · 2014-01-27 12:39 · #
Thanks for the reply. I click on the sidebar or recommended videos a lot so that probably is the case.
Forgive my lack of knowledge in this area, but I have heard of plugins or extensions that force youtube to use html and not the flash player. If blocking ads in flash is the problem in safari, would it work if youtube played on an html5 player instead?
Just a thought… I’m probably wrong.
Reply from Sebastian Noack:
Yes, you shouldn’t see any ads with the HTML5 player. But unfortunately not all videos on YouTube are available for the HTML5 player, yet.
James · 2014-01-27 13:00 · #
Oh that’s pretty cool though! It’s a temporary workaround at least. I’ve found an extension that let’s me use html5 for most videos. Haven’t encountered one that doesn’t work yet, but I might do.
Hopefully the html5 support on youtube will only get better with time.