Fair enough. I just checked the AdGuard support forums. They agree that this feature can't work with the Content Blocker approach on macos. There's no way they can get any hooks into the browser, so interstitial ads will remain just that: interstitial.
I can see that AdGuard is probably a decent product for most other current browsers, though. Thanks for suggesting it anyway.
Why are you even bothering to type such things? I'm not talking about iOS in this sub-thread. The discussion here is about Safari on macos in the present day, not the effed up macos of the future. Can we just have a discussion about the present day please?
Seriously, you guys are relentless and exhausting! It might be time for me to bow out of Hacker News for good, if this sort of nonsense keeps up in the comments. Getting to be as bad for discourse as Reddit.
All I'm saying is that the browser-external Content Blocking approach Apple has chosen doesn't work very well and is disappointing in practice, even if it's a better proposition in terms of browser security. This currently has nothing to do with walled gardens on macos, whilst one can choose to use other browsers and add in-browser extensions that filter ads more effectively (as well as being able to remove DOM elements).
If you've got a helpful suggestion about Safari and the advertising situation, then please comment about that. As it happens, I'm not using Safari, but I remain interested in trying it again under macos, if Apple or someone else can offer proper ad blocking / ad removal.
Chrome is going that way too (it is proposed to remove permissions for integrated blocker extensions), but that _does_ have more to do with Google's nefarious ambitions with respect to advertising income, just as much as it is to do with security, I suspect.
Hmmm... just tried AdGuard on a couple of high profile web sites using Safari. Sure, Adguard is working to some extent.
On the first site - no ads. Whitespace where the ads would have been because content blockers can't interfere with the DOM and remove fragments.... but not bad.
Then I went to the NYT. Absolutely massive banner ad, full width of the screen taking up 25% of my screen real estate.. and then repeated again further down below the content. Looks utterly gross.
Now of course I don't have to use the NYT and could choose never to go to that site ever again, but this is the problem with Content Blockers that I'm talking about - they aren't enough on their own. So again, Safari is not usable with this approach.
Do you really see no ads, danaris? Perhaps you just don't go to these sorts of websites. Go and look at nytimes.com, using only AdGuard and Safari under macos and tell me what to see.
The claims on the AdGuard website are misleading... get this:
"No ads on YouTube - We'd wager you like watching YouTube and you don't like ads. The same for us! Luckily, AdGuard remover knows how to get rid of ads on Mac (even video ads)".
So I go to YT ... click on the first video on the homepage and there you go: advert... straight in. I mean I expected this, but again, the claims are just misleading. I mean perhaps that works on other OSes.
Whereas, with a browser-integrated blocking solution in Firefox - no video ads. I don't see how macos / iOS Content Blockers can't really be good enough when only inspecting traffic to the browser.
Ooh. Thanks danaris! I thought I'd already tried AdGuard in the past... but I may be mistaken. Will install today and give it a spin.
Ah cool: The Adguard website says that they've just added M1 support. I think M1 support was probably part of the issue when I was last trying the available blockers.
Do I believe that I'm Apple's target market? No. Do I believe they care about me as an individual? No, not really.
However...
I'm not seeing how your comment is relevant to my statement that I don't want to use Apple's browser in its current state, when I can easily use many other browsers in what you've described as their "walled prison", and I do use them.
Whilst the situation may change for the worse in the future (resulting in a true walled garden), I can currently install anything I like on macos - you don't have to use the app store. This isn't iOS.
I don't feel abused by Apple at all. Conversely, I have been relentlessly abused by Microsoft in the past, however; (no choice in some old jobs)... and recent news stories concerning Windows 11 suggest that they're still at it. My experience suggests that things really aren't as bad as you're implying.
I really want to like Safari and I try every release, but I can't use it for more than a few minutes because the adverts that get through are just so unbelievably bad (to someone that isn't used to seeing any). The Apple-recommended strategy of using simple OS-level Content Blockers just doesn't cut it unfortunately. It's such a shame (to me) that all that developer effort on Safari is effectively wasted because of the relentless scurge of ads.
I understand why Apple decided to prevent the install of integrated Ad blockers directly in the browser because it's a security risk, but the reality is that the web is unusable without them. I really hope that there is an Apple Engineer reading this, and that some day Apple will find a solution :-)
Perhaps the solution is as simple as Apple curating their own approved blocking database similar to that used by popular adblockers and baking it into Safari in a secure fashion. Then again, that might open them to legal challenges.
I don't diagree with you on some of the Dyson products being gimmicky with a premium price tag, and the air purifier does look suspect to me. However, the Dyson v11 cordless vacuum I just bought is phenomenal.
It has far better suction and cleaning effectiveness than anything I've ever used - which is partly why I bought the v11. Our mains powered central vacuum just wasn't cutting it, and was bothersome to use.
That's been my impression for as long as I can remember. Very puritanical compared to, say, Europe... and yet violence is no problem. I honestly don't think that I'll ever understand what the hangup with nipples is all about.
Agree - This GitHub theme is unfortunately too dark. Which is a shame, because I was genuinely excited to read that GH has released a dark mode.
I use many dark mode themes and have even created them. The important thing to constantly keep in mind whilst authoring a dark them is: resist the urge to go "too dark" and contrasty, and to keep checking against a known "good" reference.
If any GitHub execs are reading this, and would like to see an example of what we're talking about here, then the JetBrains "Darkula" theme in IntelliJ is a well done dark theme.
> Clojure and F# are my two favourite languages and I have similar experience
Same. I have worked in both F# and Clojure profressionally. I love them both for different reasons.
As a fun thought experiment, I have often tried to force myself to choose between them, even though one doesn't really have to make a choice. Turns out that it's a tough choice to give one up over the other.
I tend to lean slightly towards Clojure at present, but then I'm using it a great deal at work.
However, if you're looking for a modern strongly typed, immutable functional language with type inference, then F# is really excellent.
I haven't used Haskell professionally and have only played with it but my feeling is that I prefer F# to Haskell because it has some "escape hatches" built in, in order to interop with C# and other .NET languages; So no IO Monad is required. It feels like more of a supporting structure and less of a straightjacket to me.
It's just one of those things where the different context between countries doesn't translate well.
In the UK, if you say "TCP" everybody knows that you're talking about the antiseptic phenolic liquid that can be used for gargling but never swallowed. It's present in most househould medicine cabinets.
It's important to note here, given that the subject is loss of the sense of taste and smell, that this stuff absolutely reeks.
Infuriating as hell that we are forced to pay for something that not only we don't wish to use or support, but it also inflates the Windows sales figures and percieved install base vs Linux installed base. Grr.
Electron contains the Chromium browser code, yes. But you still have to render to that browser.
Electron also contains a back-end Node.js process and a bunch of related JS APIs for building and hosting these apps.
Anyway, I accept your point that I'd be replacing a browser with... well a browser and some other stuff.
The problem though is the proliferation of Electron apps everywhere... suddenly your OS is full of these things and you don't get the memory management benefits of running just one Chrome or Chromium. Each app having its own copy of Chromium and Node.js merrily consuming CPU and RAM like they're the only ones doing it.
Signal, GitHub, Slack, VS Code, Skype, Notion, Tusk, WhatsApp etc. It's a cancer, I tell ya!
Ughh. And We're not even talking about the security issues here.
Many people seem to be comparing Janet and Clojure here as if one had to choose to use only one or the other.
Most of my daily work is done in Clojure or ClojureScript and that will continue to be true. However, I am excited by what I've seen in Janet and I'm already thinking that I'd love to call this from bash scripts to do system tasks (devops for example) that don't need the JVM cranked up.
Disappointed? Not at all! I worked with it many years ago.
Whilst WCF made some notable improvements over what existed within the ecosystem before it, it was still a sprawling, complex PITA and full of developer friction. Killing it off in this case was definitely the right thing to do :-)
I can see that AdGuard is probably a decent product for most other current browsers, though. Thanks for suggesting it anyway.