A new MacBreak Weekly has dropped. Comment below!
That was an outstanding episode. Jason managed the team well and even made fun of Leo’s scheduling: missing two of the most news-full weeks of the year; returning just in time for the slow season. I listened last night; my immediate response was that I need to listen again with the transcript in hand. Thanks to the team for listing the link to the transcript in the show notes.
Jason’s macOS 15 Sequoia review on SixColors was great. The “Hide Distracting Items” in Safari is going to fundamentally change browsing habits. I watch several YouTube channels that discuss a story off of the web; I’m certain they will rapidly adapt to using Safari on a Mac for this feature alone. I showed Jason’s writeup and video on this feature to a non-technical friend; they immediately got it. The Thanos-Snap™ animation showing the disintegrating advertisement wafting off of the screen is Apple-design genius.
I don’t know how many readers have ever read Fredrick Pohl’s The Space Merchants. A major theme of this novel is a vast divide between the upper class and everybody else. The lower classes are inundated with stupefyingly-loud advertising. It’s not a great novel, but there are some outstanding and highly prescient ideas described in the novel.
Pohl also had the great HeeChee Saga; the first two books were outstanding. His “Where the Heechee Went” chapter was the precedent for ideas in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy (which started with “The Three Body Problem”). From his works in the 1950s to the early 2000s, the late Frederick Pohl was a great visionary.
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I also love Jason Snell as a host. I thought it was a nice touch that Leo changed his clothes between each week’s ads.
If you’re like me, and also really like Jason: he has another Apple podcast called Upgrade that just celebrated it’s 10 year anniversary. It was also a great listen.
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I just installed macOS Sequoia on my M1 iMac. Oh, my. Hide Distracting Items is going to have a huge impact on Mac users – and Internet marketing. This one feature may cause users to switch to the Mac. The Snell-named Thanos-Click on a distractor is highly addictive. It’s great for loud ads; it’s even better for nuking self-starting videos. The only thing I need to add is a keyboard shortcut. I hope Apple is keeping [anonymized] stats on how many distractors have been wiped out. It reminds me of the McDonalds store signs: Over 50 Million Distractors Hidden This Week.
The largest downside I see is that the scripts on some websites will immediately serve up a new ad once the first one is nuked. I suppose that the web-advertising designers could make their websites even more toxic, but I don’t see any cheese at the end of that path.
Kudos to the Apple designers who added this functionality and made it so beautiful and obvious. Amazing that they were able pull it off without the guidance of Sir Jony Ive. 
It’s true. Hide distracting items is a huge feature. That’s actually one of the features I rely on the most from extensions like uBlock Origin that will be lost in their transition to Manifest v3 compatibility.
This feature is huge for me on my iPad where I just run stock Safari.
(I need to learn how to do proper replies, and in-line stuff in Discourse. I did the tutorial, but clearly it didn’t stick. I don’t think I’ve ever done what I intended to do correctly)
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I use a PiHole at home and Brave at the moment, so I don’t get any ads on most sites. I just tried Safari, but couldn’t find anything to block. Our corporate AV system seems to block a lot as well. I’ll see if I can find a site at work that does have advertising displayed and try it out…
One example is the Tripadvisor site. When you go to look at the specifics of a hotel in a city, Tripadvisor immediately pops up a “do your reservation NOW” calendar. They also pop up a “Unlock the BEST of tripadvisor” window – a google login window. I don’t really need the best; mediocre Tripadvisor is fine for me. Maybe your content blocker can zap that login window, but I doubt if it zaps the pop-up “do my reservation NOW” window. Sometimes, you might actually want that.
Typically, these two windows will continue to pop up for your entire Tripadvisor session, and I really don’t like playing whack-a-mole with those windows. Some marketing genius thinks being sufficiently obnoxious will increase the conversion rate for this [otherwise-outstanding] website. If you Thanos-snap these two windows with Hide Distracting, they don’t come back for the remainder of your session. If you watch closely, you can see them actively re-disappear (is that a word?). OTOH, if you explicitly reload the webpage, all of those Thanos-snapp’d distractors will return – just like it’s Five. Years. Later. That is a very nice design solution to accidentally zapping something you didn’t want zapped.
Zoom is very nice, too. You can now set a site-specific zoom level for each webpage. Every webpage is designed differently, so different zoom levels make perfect sense. Both “hide distracting” and zoom are highly useful accessibility features. I really like how both of these features work [almost] exactly the same way on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS. Bravo, Apple!
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The persistence of hidden windows on subsequent visits to a website leads to a question. How are they identifying windows-to-be-hidden? Are they just doing a hash on the contents of the window?
What would keep the web designers from deliberately start dithering their distracting windows to keep from getting re-identified in the future? I’m sure Apple has thought about this. Do they have countermeasures?
It’s an arms race!
They would need to rename the DIV tags for each visit, which would mean rewriting the XSS file for every visit.
I know this is a family friendly forum, so I won’t go into specifics. But there’s ads on the right side of some sites. And I’ve noticed the blocker does work, but when you refresh the page, it all goes back to “normal”. So I do think some sites are already smart enough to dynamically do that (meanwhile uBlock works every time). But on the flip side, I think there is SOME machine leaning going on because sometimes, it’ll automatically block the ad. But only sometimes. Even though it works everytime if you select it again.
Ultimately I think I will get bored / tired of blocking it every time, but it’ll be cool to see just how much it can learn.
I’m happy with the feature. It’s nice. It’s not necessarily trying to be uBlock Origin, but it’s really cool that it includes one of the best features (even if it doesn’t always automatically work)
It could possibly be that the site uses different providers for the ads, so the DIVs will have different names.
uBlock Origin blocks at the domain level, so all known advertisers will be blocked as opposed to specific elements.
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