Safari's ad-blocking abilities are no more potent than what Chrome's Manifest v3 gives you. In fact, the changes in MV3 were inspired by Safari.
I used to work adjacent to a team working on anti-ad-blocking tech. Safari's protections are fairly easy to circumvent, with Adblock Plus not being great either. It was uBlock Origin that was making this team sweat, and they didn't even bother with it.
The reason is that whatever you can do in the browser, e.g., via JavaScript, uBO can inject scripts with stubs and protections to fool any anti-ad-blocking tech that ads are, in fact, being served. There's no way to combat uBO without a degraded user experience, even for users that aren't using ad-blockers. Compared with uBlock Origin, other alternatives looked like toys.
Note that many people are happy with just DNS-level blocking, even if it's the easiest to circumvent. That's because many publishers don't bother with circumventing ad-blocking protections, either because it's too expensive, or because they don't want to piss off users. But that doesn't mean that the available solutions are equivalent. They aren't.
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Note, if an ad-blocker also works “inside other apps”, on iPhone it's only because the same blockers can be activated inside web views. But not in all apps and not even in all web views, e.g., try it in Facebook's app.
Android has a solution that actually works in apps, but to achieve this, it requires root, and it will act as a man in the middle, and that's not something that I can trust:
I used to work adjacent to a team working on anti-ad-blocking tech. Safari's protections are fairly easy to circumvent, with Adblock Plus not being great either. It was uBlock Origin that was making this team sweat, and they didn't even bother with it.
The reason is that whatever you can do in the browser, e.g., via JavaScript, uBO can inject scripts with stubs and protections to fool any anti-ad-blocking tech that ads are, in fact, being served. There's no way to combat uBO without a degraded user experience, even for users that aren't using ad-blockers. Compared with uBlock Origin, other alternatives looked like toys.
Note that many people are happy with just DNS-level blocking, even if it's the easiest to circumvent. That's because many publishers don't bother with circumventing ad-blocking protections, either because it's too expensive, or because they don't want to piss off users. But that doesn't mean that the available solutions are equivalent. They aren't.
---
Note, if an ad-blocker also works “inside other apps”, on iPhone it's only because the same blockers can be activated inside web views. But not in all apps and not even in all web views, e.g., try it in Facebook's app.
Android has a solution that actually works in apps, but to achieve this, it requires root, and it will act as a man in the middle, and that's not something that I can trust:
https://adguard.com/en/adguard-android/overview.html