WebShield – A new wide-spectrum content blocker for Safari

Can someone explain what "wide-spectrum content blocker" means and how it differs from other ad blockers available for Safari?

To set a baseline: Ad blockers work by a combination of static rulesets and dynamic javascript.

Safari does not support the ruleset format of Chrome/Firefox, so a ruleset has to be maintained for it specifically. In practice this is always the AdGuard ruleset. I doubt a single adblocker doesn't use this as a base.

Beyond that is the custom JS they inject. It's hard to say how good it is but that is the only selling point:

- https://github.com/arjpar/WebShield/tree/cae7629f1c5fb79fe76...

AdGuard has its own too:

- https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardForSafari/tree/master/... (JS files)

They look similar in a lot of ways, because well they have to, but I haven't done any deep analysis.

Safari extensions will never match uBlock Origin because it simply does not provide the same APIs (webRequest blocking and DNS) that Firefox does. The ruleset format is also more limited.