24 MACWORLD APRIL 2020
MACUSER REVIEW: 1BLOCKER 3and offers a search option to find them.
But it’s cumbersome to use, because the
app doesn’t group these rules into
something like subcategories. Twitter, for
instance, has 1,050 rules in the Block
Widgets category, and each rule has to be
flipped off one at a time. In the version
tested, disabling a rule caused the search
selection to disappear showing all rules in
the category. It would be a thankless and
unappetizing task to proceed.
CUSTOMIZE AND WHITELIST
Each rule can block a URL pattern,
cookies sent when loading a given URL
pattern, and the display of a CSS
(Cascading Style Sheet) element, where
CSS is used for overlay boxes and similar
page elements. When blocking URLs, the
rule can also specify whether everything
from that location is blocked or a
particular kind of item is blocked, like an
image or a script.
You can click the Custom button in the
1Blocker app in its upper-left corner,
choose a category, then click the +New
Rule button in the lower-right corner to
add rules appropriate for that category.
This includes whitelisting, site URLs,
cookies, and CSS elements. You can
choose to force a site to only load via a
secure https URL.
Whitelisting is a powerful tool to trust a
site fully. It bypasses any rule choices
you’ve made, except forcing all-https
requests.
When you visit a site, the 1Blocker
menu-bar button provides useful
feedback. You can opt to display a
badge that notes how many items were
blocked. Click the button and click
Blocked Resources, and you can
examine which URLs were blocked.
Unfortunately, probably due to Apple’s
rules about app interaction with
extensions, the 1Blocker labels for rulesThe drop-down 1Blocker button reveals which
items were blocked on a given page and can
optionally show the count as a badge.