As usual, a lot of the innovation you probably take for granted happens through side channels, user-favouring features that would never appear unless they can be "unauthorized" add-ons. Like ad blocking. I understand that some people value convenience above all else, but maybe you never experienced the bad old days when everything was locked down. It's good that Apple still has competition and others are conscious of what might happen.

>"unauthorized" add-ons. Like ad blocking.

There are iOS ad blockers on the Apple App Store, and extensions for MacOS Safari. I'm not sure how much more authorized it can get than that unless you want Tim Cook to hold your hand through the process.

The point I didn't make clearly enough is ad blockers probably wouldn't exist if others hadn't introduced this kind of feature through userscripts and add-ons. If only Apple can enable these abilities, it's up to other ecosystems to innovate and define access.

In my opinion, the most important branch the Web could take right now is going from transparent content to opaque content. Now I can filter, transform, organize and augment content accessed through my browser, and even remix it, all enabled by the inherent organizing of the technology, which suggests to the larger society more can be done. It's an open question though, and that technology could be changed to restrict what can be done with content.

that only works with safari of course because they don't want chrome having feature parity or, gasp, being better!

It also works with any app that uses the Safari View Controller - like Feedly.

If Google wanted to include their own ad blocker with Chrome they could - it is highly unlikely that they would want to.

For instance, Firefox for iOS's settings screen indicates it offers some sort of "tracking protection" in Incognito Mode by default. I remember reading about how this works on the desktop[1], but I've not had a chance to understand how well this is implemented on iOS.

Still, it's clear Chrome could offer an adblocker if they wanted to.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection

Add blocking is something Safari (and Apple) does better than the any other browser vendor, IMO.

A good ad blocker for Safari (on Mac or iOS) just uses the Content Blockers system, and provides essentially a JSON blob with a bunch of rules in it to Webkit, which will then take the requested actions (mostly block, sometimes hide elements, sometimes force a URL to https) internally - the Ad Blocker "app" never knows what sites you're visiting and is never involved in actual blocking.