Want to block ads on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad? wBlock is quickly becoming my favorite solution: it’s free, open source, fast, and customizable.
Ad blocking is in a weird place. Google, the company that makes more money from advertising than any other on Earth, is actively working to make ad blockers worse on Chrome while it also makes it harder to block ads on YouTube . Basically, it’s a good time to not use Chrome.
So it’s nice that Apple users have another choice: Safari. And, as luck would have it, Safari has an extremely efficient API for ad blocking built right in. The ad blocker wBlock uses this, and the result is ads are blocked in a way that doesn’t slow down your browsing.
I wrote a few months ago about uBlock Origin for Safari , which doesn’t use Apple’s native blocking feature. I enjoyed how effective that application was at blocking ads, but over time I’ve found it does impact the performance of my browser a little. After setting up wBlock, everything feels snappy.
You can install wBlock from the App Store on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad. After doing so, you can choose which filter lists you want to use. Several are offered, or you can just stick with the defaults.
Credit: Justin Pot
You will also be asked if you want to enable any userscripts. The ones offered bring back YouTube’s old interface and bypass paywalls. You can also install custom userscripts, if you want, meaning you won’t need a separate application for that functionality.
After that, you’ll need to open Safari, head to the settings, and turn on all the wBlock entries you see on the extensions page. Do that and you should be able to browse the web without any ads.
If you’re curious about how this extension works and how it compares to other Safari ad blockers, I recommend checking out the documentation on Github —it goes over how this tool works and how it differs from other applications. I also encourage you to think about the pros and cons of blocking ads overall.
