I trust uBO and roughly zero others. In fact, uBO has to remind people at every opportunity to avoid certain others. It is all the others, now and in the future, that are prompting Apple to do this, and the one well-behaved extension is unfortunately suffering as a result.

I mourn the loss of uBO, but I'll take that tradeoff knowing that I can relax knowing that my family and friends aren't going to end up using some intrusive nightmare of an "ad-blocker" with Safari.

This is exactly it. Even if a malicious extension gets through, they have access to nothing on the user side. It's not a fair trade off but, in my opinion, it is a worthwhile one.

> That was my impression at least, I never personally went through the source code.

That's the rub though. There's nothing but trust preventing them from including some spyware in the next automatic update. Actually not even trust, whoever has account access to publish for uBlock could have their account hacked and someone malicious could inject spyware into a version of the extension.

Trust is everywhere in computer security. You trust Google to not deliver a backdoored version of Chrome to your machine when you download a binary instead of building from source. You trust them to not break the law and leak your personal data to third parties or discriminate against you based on the content of your emails.

I trust Raymond Hill more than I trust Google.

This isn't as much about what existing extensions do today but all about what potential extension could be doing tomorrow.

If an extension doesn't get full access to all the pages you are reading, it can't do bad things with that access when the extension's owner inevitably changes (see the fight between uBlock and uBlock Origin for example) and spyware features are added.

Even if it is, it doesn’t matter. The problem Apple faces is how to prevent the other bad actors from abusing their API. The answer they’ve settled on is remove those capabilities from the API. Another answer would be to leave the capabilities but somehow only grant access to them to “trusted” parties.

I’m sure that would have gone over really well, too. /s