Other apps also followed in September 2018, when Apple's new rules were set in stone with iOS 12's release. AdBlock published a blog post where it said its re-written Safari ad blocker was running faster than before, but also listed a long list of downsides. A few days later, it was followed by antivirus maker Malwarebytes, which shut down its VPN extension. Ad blockers, VPN, and parental control extensions were the most impacted by Apple's new "app extensions + content blocker" ecosystem.Īd blocker AdGuard shut down its Safari extension in July last year. They saw universally-working app extensions and the new content blocker API, which Apple advertised as a way to isolate extensions and prevent them from accessing browsing data.
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Currently, Safari users can't install any legacy extension at all, regardless if it's hosted on the Safari Extensions Gallery or not, or if they're using iOS or macOS.ĭuring all this, Apple users didn't bat an eye at the changes, mainly because they only saw the benefits. Starting this week, with the release of iOS 13, Apple ditched the old Safari Extensions Gallery for good, and offically announced it was deprecating legacy extensions. Many extension devs have said the popup appeared indiscriminately, regardless of what the extension did, and many accepted that this was Apple's way of nudging users into ditching the legacy extensions for the new Safari "App Extensions"-based add-ons. The message appeared for all sorts of legacy extensions, from simple copy-paste enhancers to ad blockers and antivirus parental control extensions. The first move to enforce this came in September 2018 when Apple launched iOS 12, and the OS maker began blocking the installation of legacy Safari extensions from outside the Safari Extensions Gallery.īy the end of the year, Apple stopped accepting legacy extensions in the Safari Extensions Gallery altogether, and also began disabling legacy extensions in users' browsers with a message of "Safari turned off extensions that slow down your web browsing."
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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.
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