Content blocker not removing content

Question

Created Jan ’25

Replies 2

Boosts 1

Participants 1

I have a content blocker that generally works correctly, but I need to block an element that has certain text in it.

For example, <span id="theId">Some text</span> is easy enough to block because I can locate the id and block that, but what if there is no id, or the id is completely random? What if it's just <span>Some text</span>? How do I block that?

Let's say this is my only content blocker rule:

[
  {
    "action": {
      "type": "css-display-none",
      "selector": ":has-text(/Some text/i)"
    },
    "trigger": {
      "url-filter": ".*"
    }
  }
]

No errors are seen when the rule is loaded, so it's syntactically correct, it just doesn't block the HTML. I gather this is because :has-text() works on attributes, not contents, so it works on alt, href, aria-label etc. but not on the contents of the element itself.

How do I block Some text in my example above? Thanks!

Answered by darkpaw in 824489022

I figured it out. Using :has-text(/myText/i) seems to work.

But... I still think Apple need to do far better in their documentation. One example is not good enough, especially when Apple devs are writing frameworks that cover many scenarios - why not mention some of those in the docs?

Boost

Answer 1

darkpaw OP

Jan ’25

Is no one writing content blocker rules anymore?

Anyone at Apple know how to handle this? You guys wrote the content blocker framework; you must have examples of how to use it?

This page: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/creating-a-content-blocker only has one example, and doesn't cover much at all.

Searching the internet seems to just return info on how the various adblocker apps work - including using their own internal methods (-abp-has(> div > img.advert) etc.), which Safari cannot use.

If we cannot select elements by the text they contain, then content blockers in Safari are severely hampered. What if I don't want to see news stories about football? Unless the alt tag of an img has the word 'football' in it, I can't block it, and I can't block something as simple as this: <a href="/pages/sport/thebiggame/">Football</a>.

1

Answer 2

darkpaw OP

Feb ’25

Accepted Answer

I figured it out. Using :has-text(/myText/i) seems to work.

But... I still think Apple need to do far better in their documentation. One example is not good enough, especially when Apple devs are writing frameworks that cover many scenarios - why not mention some of those in the docs?

0