I'm sympathetic to concerns about people who don't know what they're doing, but if I'm a Safari user, I have to value keeping myself safe first. This change makes ordinary users safer, but makes power users less safe.
I understand why Apple is doing it. But I'm still going to advise responsible owners to ditch Safari and pick a browser that will do a better job of blocking trackers.
The problem is that all of the spyware says exactly the same thing. If the API exists, ordinary users are going to be asked to make huge security decisions with no effective way to tell whether the vendor (or the new owner who just bought it) is being honest.
> I'm sympathetic to concerns about people who don't know what they're doing, but if I'm a Safari user, I have to value keeping myself safe first.
This change still means that Firefox will have better adblocking and privacy tools than Safari. It's a tradeoff -- and if I'm a user that's already conservative about granting extensions permissions, I don't see how I get any benefits from this. I only get the downsides in the form of less effective blockers.
Ka-Block actually advertises itself as being less effective than uBO. It's selling point is that it's a simpler extension that blocks fewer ads and trackers, under the assumption that this is good enough and on it'll on average be faster because of the reduced overhead.
> Some ads will get through this filter, and that's ok. We already have extensions that block every ad that's ever appeared on the web with a completionist zeal that must be admired.[0]
If you're blocking ads just to make pages load faster, Ka-Block is probably fine. If your primary goal is to protect your privacy, you shouldn't be using Ka-Block.
For privacy concerns, I would imagine that preventing the methods of tracking is much safer and more effective in the long-run than blocking the trackers themselves. Apple seems to be pushing pretty heavily on that front.
Definitely agreed. But nobody (including Apple) is going to pull that off for a pretty long while.
In the meantime, it's useful to be able to do things like block all third-party AJAX requests and whitelist them on the fly on a per-site basis, or intercept CDN requests for common libraries and redirect them to locally hosted versions.
Extensions like UBlock Origin may be a band-aide, but sometimes band-aides are useful if you're waiting for an open wound to heal. In the same way, when I give people privacy advice, I'm optimizing for things they can do right now.
I'm sympathetic to concerns about people who don't know what they're doing, but if I'm a Safari user, I have to value keeping myself safe first. This change makes ordinary users safer, but makes power users less safe.
I understand why Apple is doing it. But I'm still going to advise responsible owners to ditch Safari and pick a browser that will do a better job of blocking trackers.