The reason may have to do with the fact that Apple is known to have a heavy hand in enforcing rules on its App Store, and that developers who generally speak out are usually kicked out. With the exception of a few rare complaints, people generally didn't care that Apple just neutered all Safari ad blockers, a situation that contrasts with what happened to Google in 2019, and the wave of criticism it received. It had fewer rules to apply than before.Īpple was never criticized for doing what Google didn't even doĪt the time, extension developers, including most ad blockers, migrated their code and didn't say a peep.

On the other side, when Apple rolled out the new Content Blocker API, it enforced a maximum limit of 50,000 rules for each new extension that wanted to block content inside Safari.

The company was immediatelly attacked for trying to 'kill ad blockers,' and after months of criticism, Google eventually backed down on its initial plan and settled on a higher limit ranging from 90,000 to 120,000, a number that many extension developers, and especially those managing ad blockers, still consider insufficient. Google wanted to limit the maximum rules an extension could pass to Chrome to 30,000, which many Chrome extension developers said was extremely low, and wouldn't even begin to accommodate the likes of ad blockers, parental control or traffic inspection extensions.

Instead, the extension will deploy a set of 'content blocking rules' and the browser will do the blocking without the extension seeing any user data. They will limit how extensions intercept and block web requests by preventing the extension from interacting with the web request directly. In a very simple explanation, the changes that Apple implemented in Safari and the upcoming changes planned for Chrome have taken the same path to the same goal, but with different code and terminology.īoth Chrome and Safari will use a new extensions backend.

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