How can you block URLs without seeing them? Is it something where the blocker has to submit all blocked URLs beforehand? Hashing?

The blocker provides a list of patterns to the browser, and the browser itself does the blocking.

So it can't block youtube ads then, for example.

Prepare for future, where such ad system is going to be standard and ad blockers useless.

This seems to be possible, not entirely sure how though.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...

Vinegar replaces the YouTube player with the baked in HTML5 video player. It blocks ads, but YT also restricts quality and many advanced features are not supported.

It does, at least for me (using free AdGuard).

I've noticed YouTube seem to have introduced (or are testing?) some sort of partial countermeasures recently that sneaks occasional ads through. I don't see anything like the quantity of ads I get in the YouTube iOS app, just the occasional one ad every now and then?

In practice safari blocks all ads I can see, youtube ads might be an exception but it's one of the few services that is 100% worth paying for, considering how crucial they are, how much time most of us spend watching content there, and how fair their premium offering is.

It does block Youtube ads but very poorly. Sometimes the ad plays but a refresh immediately removes it, other times it can take multiple refreshes. It's not perfect like it is when i use Firefox or Opera so I stick to Yputube on those and Safari for general browsing.

Sidenote: Also Gmail is insaaaaaaaaaanely slow on Safari and a lot of sites just don't format well or ad blockers completely break the site. Safari is by far the worst browser on Mac for site compatibility and also extension selection but I use it for better battery life when not plugged in.

> "Sidenote: Also Gmail is insaaaaaaaaaanely slow on Safari"

Huh? I haven't seen this. I have 280,000+ messages (> 20 GB) in my Gmail and everything works pretty much always works instantly in Gmail on Safari. Never see any slowness unless my internet connection is very bad, and even then Gmail does a decent job of hiding it.

(Don't get me started about Apple Mail on iOS being incredibly slow at loading Gmail messages, however...)

Not being able to block YouTube ads is always used as some kind of gotcha, but for me the trade-off is easily worth it.

Besides, blocking YouTube ads seems a lot scummier than blocking regular ads. Ad least some percentage of that ad revenue goes to the creator of the video you're watching, and not to Google. It's why I'm happy to subscribe to YouTube Premium.

I expect that at some point, declarative list ad blockers will stop working as well as they do today.

The companies with an interest in working around them probably temper their efforts, because they are aware it drives people to things like uBlock Origin that have more smarts, live heuristics, etc. Once manifest v3 kills that option off, there won't be any easy place for end users to escalate to. Then, they are free to start being more aggressive. Whatever measures they take would work around all the DNS based and declarative semi-static list based approaches.