#GLIMMERBLOCKER FOR SAFARI INSTALL#
#GLIMMERBLOCKER FOR SAFARI SOFTWARE#

Mobile is the primary user environment for a whole generation of kids and millions of people coming online in developing countries around the world. But there seems to be a broader acceptance of Apple's vision for a nice walled garden where users are safe from everything, especially themselves, and criticisms of this are just 'bitching' from people who need to see the bigger picture. There might be technical reasons why browser extensions are particularly problematic and it might make sense to phase them out in their current form, so, to be clear, that's not what I'm getting hung up on. If their past history is any indicator, they will bring back or improve up on this functionality so that power users get it back somehow but, in the meantime, the bigger and more pressing issue is what takes precedence. In my opinion, Apple's trying to do something about that even if it comes at the expense of a few power users losing some conveniences. There is so much advanced technology out there now that people don't even understand the consequences of the most mundane actions. More skilled users just want to bitch about what gets taken away from them personally without acknowledging the giant elephant that is ignorance. The real answer is to do a better job educating people about what everything is but no one wants to do that. Especially when it comes to browsing history, payment data, and passwords, it's so easy to compromise a system now when you can hide it in something like a browser extensions. They're super convenient for most people and are widely used but there's another vector of attack for people that aren't as savvy and don't understand the consequences. Now, unfortunately, we're at the same impasse with browser extensions. without really every explaining what was happening and what the potential pitfalls of that are. People would jailbreak the phones of their parents, siblings, relatives, friends, etc.

#GLIMMERBLOCKER FOR SAFARI INSTALL#

This is the same pattern that happened with IE where users would install all kinds of toolbars accidentally and then get tons of data stolen or when the first iPhone was jailbroken and everyone wanted all the cool jailbreak features. The alternative, in the past, has been to lock everything down unless users go into some kind of 'Advanced' mode or 'Developer' mode but then users just get tricked into turning that mode on anyways or more advanced users hand wave those restrictions away for less savvy users without explaining any of the implications.

#GLIMMERBLOCKER FOR SAFARI SOFTWARE#

Any time a software system or platform or OS allows for people to do whatever they want without restriction, you end up with thousands of compromised systems out there. This is a really long-standing battle between user accessibility and user freedom. But from a privacy perspective, I personally much prefer this technique. I'm noticing some issues with it myself after having upgraded to Safari 13. Apple and the content blockers have some work to do on it. It's literally just a JSON document which means Safari can perform better. It is, in essence, a mask that is applied to a web page before rendering. One advantage this technique provides over ad blocking is that there's no data to be phoned back home. The action can be one of several options, one of which is to block that item. Content blockers give Safari a list of triggers and actions to take when something matches a trigger.įor example you can have a trigger which contains a regex that matches all images and stylesheets for a given domain.

Instead they've switched to a model that matches what they've been doing on iOS which is content blocking.

Some people are taking this to mean that Safari has completely banned ad blockers, which isn't the case.

There is a lot of confusion around this issue.

Glimmerblocker for safari