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 implemented an abstraction layer with a backend for Chrome/Opera and a backend for Safari. 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 (works, but will break functionality on some websites due to a WebKit bug, usually affects image magnifiers)

Safari 6

Safari 7 (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 only).

Icon popup contents will sometimes not update when loading a page into a new tab (Safari 7 only).

Beside that Safari’s extension API is more limited than those of other browsers and therefore:

Requests initiated by third-party plugins like Flash can’t be blocked. This mostly affects in-video ads (like prerolls), however not those on YouTube, which are blocked in a different way.

XMLHttpRequests can’t be blocked.

If you find other issues please report them on the forum (registration is not necessary) or consider contributing

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