Privacybadger: Privacy Badger should support Safari

[cypherpunk]

[cooperq]

I will gladly accept pull requests for this, or will provide assistance to a project that is doing this, but I don't have the time to make those versions.

[ecliptik]

@cooperq with the recent passage of SJ Res 34, could this be re-opened to support more browsers?

[freediverx]

Please support Safari. Firefox is an unstable mess of a browser.

[ghostwords]

It doesn't seem like Safari provides a way to intercept and potentially modify headers, something that is covered by chrome.webRequest in Chrome (and now Firefox via WebExtensions). The problem is that canLoad offers only a subset of chrome.webRequest functionality.

So it appears that Safari is missing some functionality required by Privacy Badger to function, but this needs more investigation. Does the newer declarative content Blocking API help?

[jessesquires]

@ghostwords Is this the only blocker for Safari support, or are there others?

[ghostwords]

There are these technical issues (but they need further investigation to see whether they really are blockers or not), but then there are also legal issues with things Apple asks you to agree to if you want to publish (?) a Safari extension. The legal issues might be the real blockers. I need to investigate what those are and whether we could do anything about them.

[jessesquires]

A new notes/resources on content blocking in Safari:

• https://webkit.org/blog/3476/content-blockers-first-look/
• https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2015/511/
• https://github.com/Erulezz/Ultimate-AdBlock

Regarding "publishing" -- the only thing here is if you want your extension listed in Apple's "extension gallery", then Apple has to approve it. I'm not sure this is absolutely necessary. EFF could just link to the GitHub latest release.

[MmmmJoel]

@jessesquires is correct. You do not need to agree to Apple's terms and pay $100 to release a Safari extension. It is only required if you want to be listed in the extension gallery.

[svandragt]

https://stackoverflow.com/a/28808411 should help with the porting effort

[cowlicks]

I doubt this would be very hard! If anyone who uses Safari (I don't own a mac) want's to port it, I'd be happy to guide you and answer any questions you have.

A warning to everyone, my first major contribution to PB was porting it to FF, and look where that got me ;)

[JamesMcMahon]

This may no longer be needed with High Sierra's tracking blocking in Safari. I hope the EFF does a review of the functionality when it's released to make sure it adequate for privacy minded users.

[JamesMcMahon]

They read my mind, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/apple-does-right-users-wrong-advertisers.

I take this as an endorsement of Apple’s implementation.

[chris1000]

I just wanted to see if this is still active and if there is anything I can do to help with the project

[ghostwords]

The main problem with offering a version of Privacy Badger for Safari is that, after legal review, EFF found Apple's developer agreement unacceptable for some of the reasons stated in this EFF blog post (the post talks about iOS, but the problem also applies to Safari/macOS). I believe this problem goes beyond being listed in the extensions gallery.

Furthermore, Safari seems to lack certain extension capabilities required by Privacy Badger to function properly. Privacy Badger is not an ad blocker; Privacy Badger is different from most other privacy tools as it does not come with a list of domains to block. Instead, Privacy Badger watches and learns which third-party domains appear to track you as you browse the Web, something that doesn't seem fully supported by Safari.

I personally recommend installing uBlock Origin, an excellent privacy tool.

[ghostwords]

See also this HTTPS Everywhere thread: https://github.com/EFForg/https-everywhere/issues/5121#issuecomment-343277620

[fuzzy76]

Can we get a new look on this, since Safari in the new macOS will support webextensions?

[ghostwords]

The biggest obstacle to supporting Safari at this point is that as per Apple documentation, the webRequest extension API does not support blocking or modifying requests/responses. As AdGuard write on their blog, Safari's version of the webRequest API is "useless for ad blocker developers". (Privacy Badger is not an ad blocker but has similar API requirements.)

This doesn't mean we won't have Privacy Badger for Safari in the future. For example, we could build a version of Privacy Badger as a Safari content blocker app. However, as this will take significant effort to build and maintain, it competes for attention with similar but more urgent efforts like a Manifest V3 version of Privacy Badger for Chrome (#2273).

[10Meisterbaelle]

Please support Safari. Firefox is an unstable mess of a browser.

You can get ungoogled-chromium😉