SafariBlock
I finally got fed up with Firefox’s lack of threading support. This means that the entire application hangs when rendering a webpage. I switched to Safari, which is much more responsive. Unfortunately, I immediately found out how ad-infested the web is… I’ve been running Firefox with the Adblock Plus plugin for so long, I didn’t realize how annoying the web had gotten.
After a bit of hunting around, I found SafariBlock by FSB Software. It’s an Adblock-like plugin for Safari.
One downside is that it doesn’t ship with a list of filters. There are filters out there for Adblock, but SafariBlock doesn’t yet support regular expressions like Adblock does. Here’s the solution:
- Download and install SafariBlock
- Download the latest version of FilterSet.G from http://www.pierceive.com/
- Open the text file in Wordpad, and copy and paste it into the deregifier
- Copy the output list into a new filter file, and remove any regular expressions that deregifier couldn’t handle
- Import the new filter file using SafariBlock’s import feature in the preferences.
I also discovered another downside: The basic “*” pattern matching that is does support is very basic, only working at the beginning and end of a pattern. This means that a pattern like “*.example.com*.swf?*” won’t work.