There is no spin. Apple is pretty open about restricting freedom to increase security.
Many people don’t have time or inclination to check which extension is doing what. Proof is the fact that ublock and adblock are bad, but ublock origin is good.
Whose non-techy friends and family are going to spend time to figure that one out? In that case, the macOS and iOS content blocking system is better for those users.
> If the extension can't inspect the traffic it can't meaningfully filter content.
I’m sorry, but does uBlock Origin detects & filter ads based on contents?
I thought they maintained a database of URLs that serve ads & page elements... and Safari content blockers also have the same capability to block content based on URLs (hence can block YouTube ads).
BTW, PiHole blocks ads based on hostname... and is more incapable than Safari content blockers.
uBlock Origin can be configured to do much more than a simple list based filter (like EasyList, etc). [1] It's not quite the same as detecting, but it's incredibly configurable, and that functionality can't be used when list based filtering is all that's allowed.
And I'm aware PiHole is just DNS filtering, but an extra layer of blocking is useful.
Normal extensions can potentially monitor everything you do inside your browser, even in incognito mode. They could even impersonate you.
That's a huge gaping security hole, and I think Apple is doing the right thing by preventing that.
They've spent a lot of effort with sandboxing to limit the attack surface of native apps -- it's logical that they do the same inside the browser.