Apple’s new Safari browser works well enough to be my primary browser, but I wouldn’t switch until an ad blocking system was implemented. I heard the latest 1.0bv73 version had popup blocking, but that isn’t sufficient. I poked around the web and was surprised to see that Safari supports the same ad blocking techniques as Mozilla, using a css stylesheet.
I noticed Safari’s Preferences>Advanced>Style Sheet allows you to set your own style sheet but I didn’t immediately realize this was where you put your ad blocker. I downloaded one of the more popular Mozilla ad block userContent.css stylesheets, saved it in my home directory and activated it in the prefs, and ad blocking was activated. I’ve been editing the file in BBEdit but so far I’ve had a hard time improving on it. There are some tricks for blocking Flash files but they don’t seem to work in Safari. Even so, I’m switching over to Safari because the ad blocking is now good enough to satisfy me in everyday use, and bookmark management is better than any other browser I’ve used.
Update 6/12/03: It appears this little summary is getting linked around the web, but my link to the stylesheet example at FloppyMoose.com is undergoing a temporary outage. Now you can download the stylesheet I’m using for my own ad blocking, I’ll host it on my own site for a permanent reference. If anyone can improve on this stylesheet, I’d love to hear about it, so leave a comment.
Update 4/11/04: FloppyMoose has updated his ad blocking style sheets, with improvements, so check out his site and download the latest version.
I had the same problems as you describe. I wrote a plugin for Safari called PithHelmet that enables a lot of ad blocking features.
My site was probably just down briefly for you. The ad blocking stuff is still there – the link is not dead. I’ve made some minor tweaks to it lately and also indicated some other sites that have made major additions to it. See my weblog (www.floppymoose.com/weblog) for the latter.