Safari has extensions. Apple has just made them incredibly difficult to find by burying them in the Mac App Store.

And by requiring an Apple Developer Account and associated tooling, they've made them just hard enough to develop that the long tail won't bother porting.

"Has" yes. Last time I checked the selection was horrible and most of the seemingly good ones were paid. Have things changed in the past 6-12 months?

Strongly recommend ad blocking on the network level with something like a pihole, one of the best tech related things I've ever done

Network-level blockers are very crude and tend to cause errors that are hard to debug and fix. I get it if you have no other option and they work well enough with a very conservative blocklist, but in my experience a dedicated extension will block more ads, block them better (no blank spots in pages), break legitimate content less often and when it does be far easier to temporarily bypass.

I've tracked down the "legitimate content" a few times and these are usually trackers, just baked in so deeply they break the content too.

Sure but the point is a browser level adblockers can separate the tracker content from the legitimate content while a network level blocker can either block both or neither.

Yes, but I can't install browser ad blockers on gaming consoles, TVs, and whatever other appliances the internet of shit will produce.

Also other apps.

So many large sites have started serving ads through the hostnames that serve their applications. It feels like a losing battle to keep only blocking at the DNS level.

It's true this is nice, but it's no replacement for a browser extension, and only does anything while you're at home.

I haven't left my home in what feels like 1000 years

Unless you’re also automating a VPN connection to your home network when you leave it, which can be very helpful if you’re running something like pihole

I've had pinhole straight up break real sites. Took me a bit to figure out it was pihole and not some browser extension.

I'm on Safari, with the occasional testing and account segregations with Chrome. The combination of AdGuard[1] (found via SetApp[2]) and NextDNS[3] works for me well on Safari.

1. https://adguard.com

2. https://setapp.com

3. https://nextdns.io

I use the AdGuard extension too, with a Raspberry Pi running AdGuard Home which in turn uses NextDNS. I highly recommend every part of this setup, it's maintenance free, extremely reliable and I can't remember the last time an ad or tracker got through it.

I use Wipr and nothing else and don't see ads in Safari

The adblocker Wipr has recently added something beyond the Content Blocker API with Wipr Extra. I only found it because I had forgotten to switch to AdGuard on my office Mac, and Wipr Extra showed up in an update. Lots of restrictions and caveats though about what it can and can't do. Some details at

https://giorgiocalderolla.com/wipr-faq.html#what-is-wipr-ext...

I have been happy so far with Adguard. It's not ublock origin but it will do the job.

Am a beta tester, Orion has growing support for WebExtensions API. You can run uBlock Origin and Dark Reader right now, for example.

There is more than one thing lacking from Safari. Profiles is a pretty big one as well.

I use Wipr for Mac and it blocks all ads I've seen in Safari, including YouTube ads

Just checked the recent reviews and they all say doesn't block YT ads. Is the special setting needed?