AdGuard always bothered me. On macOS it sits in the menubar and has about a half dozen extensions that load into Safari. It felt like a bloated sprawling mess. I just installed uBOL and it's a single extension that sits in Safari. It feel much more clean and unobtrusive.
Absolutely not. They are trying to protect you, can you imagine how awful Safari would be if it let you sideload such nasty extensions? It would be just like Chrome, absolutely no market variation to speak of! Despicable.
It's really AdGuard's fault for failing to fit their functionality within the arbitrary constraints Apple decided was suitable for a runtime.
Chrome's decision is also entirely arbitrary, so it's not a great example. Firefox on mobile notable supports Chrome extensions, without any real issues or battery drain whatsoever.
That’s in fact one of the gripes I have with certain MacOS software. It would be far better if menu bar icons were opt-in rather than opt-out. The average non-technical user eventually ends up having tons of these icons in the menu bar.
The existence of a menubar icon as an option implies it’s a service that needs to run all the time. I compare that perception to what uBOL mentions in the App Store description.
> uBOL is entirely declarative, meaning there is no need for a permanent uBOL process for the filtering to occur, and CSS/JS injection-based content filtering is performed reliably by the browser itself rather than by the extension. This means that uBOL itself does not consume CPU memory resources while content blocking is ongoing -- uBOL's service worker process is required _only_ when you interact with the popup panel or the option pages.
If you disable it, you can still see (silently delivered) notifications about filter updates.
EDIT: On a fresh install, AdGuard prompts to run in the background for extension updates. I also tend to separately toggle "launch AdGuard for Safari at Login" option.
