![]() On the other hand, ads are Google's life blood, and when Google announced updates that limited ad blockers, everyone saw it a secret plan for a big corp to keep its profits intact, rather than an actual security measure, as Google said it was.Īs software engineer Will Lesieutre said this week in a HackerNews comment, Apple's announcement was "totally believable because it's in line with the last 10+ years of their product direction.Update: When reached for clarification, Apple said “This is not a new guideline. When Apple rolled out a new content blocking feature to replace the old Safari extensions and said it was for everyone's privacy - as extensions won't be able to access browsing history - everyone believed it. With a market share of 3.5%, Safari users aren't even in the same galaxy as Chrome and its 65% market lead.įurthermore, there is also the problem of public perception. There was no public pressure on Apple mainly because there aren't really that many Safari users to begin with. In Google's case, the pressure started with extension developers, but it then extended to the public. Unlike in Google's case, where Chrome is based on an open-source browser named Chromium and where everyone gets a voice, everything at Apple is a walled garden, with strict rules.Īpple was never criticized for effectively "neutering" or "killing ad blockers" in the same way Google has been all this year. The reason may have to do with the fact that Apple is known to have a heavy hand in enforcing rules on its App Store, and that developers who generally speak out are usually kicked out. With the exception of a few rare complaints, people generally didn't care that Apple just neutered all Safari ad blockers, a situation that contrasts with what happened to Google in 2019, and the wave of criticism it received. Apple was never criticized for doing what Google didn't even doĪt the time, extension developers, including most ad blockers, migrated their code and didn't say a peep. On the other side, when Apple rolled out the new Content Blocker API, it enforced a maximum limit of 50,000 rules for each new extension that wanted to block content inside Safari. The company was immediatelly attacked for trying to "kill ad blockers," and after months of criticism, Google eventually backed down on its initial plan and settled on a higher limit ranging from 90,000 to 120,000, a number that many extension developers, and especially those managing ad blockers, still consider insufficient. Google wanted to limit the maximum rules an extension could pass to Chrome to 30,000, which many Chrome extension developers said was extremely low, and wouldn't even begin to accommodate the likes of ad blockers, parental control or traffic inspection extensions. Instead, the extension will deploy a set of "content blocking rules" and the browser will do the blocking without the extension seeing any user data. They will limit how extensions intercept and block web requests by preventing the extension from interacting with the web request directly. App Extensions and Content Blockerįor Apple users, it all started a few years back when the company announced App Extensions, a mechanism through which apps could extend their functionality into other apps.īoth Chrome and Safari will use a new extensions backend. Over the course of the last year and a half, Apple has effectively neutered ad blockers in Safari, something that Google has been heavily criticized all this year.īut unlike Google, Apple never received any flak, and came out of the whole process with a reputation of caring about users' privacy, rather than attempting to "neuter ad blockers." The reasons may be Apple's smaller userbase, the fact that changes rolled out across years instead of months, and the fact that Apple doesn't rely on ads for its profits, meaning there was no ulterior motive behind its ecosystem changes. ![]() There's been much said about Google's supposed plans to limit the power of ad blockers in Chrome, but something similar has already happened in Safari, and not that many people have noticed, let alone criticize Apple. 10 dangerous app vulnerabilities to watch out for (free PDF)
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