{"id":44384,"date":"2024-08-07T16:09:16","date_gmt":"2024-08-07T20:09:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=44384"},"modified":"2024-09-20T14:40:38","modified_gmt":"2024-09-20T18:40:38","slug":"safari-distraction-control","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2024\/08\/07\/safari-distraction-control\/","title":{"rendered":"Safari Distraction Control"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ivan Mehta<\/a> (Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

Safari’s newest feature, Distraction Control, can remove distracting elements from a website. The feature follows Arc Browser’s addition of Boosts <\/a>last year, which similarly lets users remove features from a site and further customize its appearance.<\/p>

Apple is rolling out the early version of the feature this week through new developer betas of iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia.<\/p>

Users can access the Distraction Control tool from the Page Menu in the Smart Search field. They then select the item on the website they want to remove. Safari will remember to remove the elements the next time they visit the site. The choice doesn’t currently sync across hardware, however, so users will have to hide the elements on each new device.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Chance Miller<\/a> (Slashdot<\/a>):<\/p>\n

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Apple also emphasizes that this feature is not meant to serve as an ad blocker. While a user can technically use Distraction Control to hide an ad on a website temporarily, that ad will re-appear when the page is refreshed or otherwise reloaded. In fact, the first time a user activates Distraction Control, Safari will display a pop-up that emphasizes the feature will not permanently remove ads or other areas of a website that frequently change.<\/p>\n

If a user chooses to hide something like a GDPR banner or a cookies request pop-up, Distraction Control behaves in the same way as if the user manually clicked to dismiss that pop-up. This means Distraction Control will serve as neither an “Accept” nor “Decline” for that cookies request.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Jeff Johnson<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

I discovered that if you hide distracting items in a private window, your settings will be preserved in memory after closing the private window and applied to other private windows, but your settings won’t be applied to non-private windows or saved to disk.<\/p>\n

However, if you hide distracting items in a non-private window, your settings will be saved to disk and also applied to private windows.<\/p>\n

Your hidden item settings are stored on disk in ~\/Library\/Safari\/UserDefinedContentBlockers.db<\/tt> on macOS. This is an SQLite database.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

It appears to be using the Safari content blockers API. The db saves a website domain, a CSS selector, and a binary plist containing various other data[…]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n