As a result, in mid-2018, Apple announced it was deprecating old "legacy" extensions and started advising Safari extensions devs to port their code to an "app extension" and upload it on the App Store. These two features made Safari's older extensions ecosystem obsolete.
Basically, apps or app extensions can use the Content Blocker API tell Safari what to block based on a set of rules before rendering a web page.Īfter letting these two features spread in the app ecosystem for a few years, Apple realized it didn't need web developers creating extensions for Safari directly, as they could simply leverage the apps in its App Store to provide Safari users with extra features.
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.Īpple said that App Extensions would work in tandem with Content Blocker, a mechanism introduced in iOS 9, in 2013. 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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