Adblock Plus today released a beta extension for Safari, promising to deliver the same features as for Chrome and Opera. You can download the new plugin now directly from adblockplus.org.
The beta is compatible with Safari version 5.1 (although it will break functionality on some websites due to a WebKit bug, usually affects image magnifiers), version 6.0, version 6.1, and version 7.0 (with some issues). Nevertheless, the extension still has the following bugs (if you spot others, report them here):
- Popups aren’t blocked.
- The number of ads blocked for the current page will sometimes not be reset when navigating to a new page (Safari 7.0 only).
- Icon popup contents will sometimes not update when loading a page into a new tab (Safari 7.0 only).
The company added an abstraction layer to the code of Adblock Plus for Chrome and Opera so that the Safari extension could use (mostly) the same codebase. As a result, the same features as well as every improvement implemented in the future could be made available for all three browsers.
That being said, Safari’s extension API is more limited than those of other browsers, so requests issued by third-party plugins like Flash can’t be blocked (video ads on YouTube are blocked in another way) and XHR requests can’t be blocked. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone: limitations are the Apple way.
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Over the last few months, Adblock Plus has significantly increased the frequency of new releases and new features. Safari users should be pleased to finally have access to one of the most popular extensions.
See also:
Not just ads: Adblock Plus now lets you block 21 other ‘annoyances’ in Facebook’s News Feed and sidebar
Adblock Plus now lets you remove photo and video previews from Twitter’s website
Adblock Plus now lets you remove 10 ‘annoyances’ from YouTube, including the Google+ commenting system
Top Image Credit: asabird
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