Adguard for Safari Help Needed

[jparker402]

Installed Adguard for Safari this morning. Have no idea how it is suppose to work, have no idea how the switches work, and now I cannot find the page where it provides what I thought were the main set of selection switches. Tried to find a good tutorial on YouTube, and haven't. Ones with most promise either have no sound or I cannot understand the speaker. Tried to find a written tutorial, and can't.

Sample question I have: Somewhere (because I can't find it now) there was a switch which said "Adguard General" - Adguard does not have permission to read or transmit content from any page." Don't know if one was suppose to turn this green or leave it blank. Now I can't even find that switch!

Frustration level currently very high!

 

[jparker402]

Discovered a phone number to Adguard, and called. A gentleman named Nick was most helpful in guiding me through the settings for Adguard for Safari, and, at the moment, the ads are gone. Now hoping that lessens the memory/cpu/beach ball issue I have been having.

Adguard for Safari is the free version of Adguard. Apparently there are other versions (for pay); one of which is Adguard for Mac. Perhaps that has better on-line help without having to call. Nick kept saying that what I had was for a Safari extension, and I don't really know what that means. Apparently Adguard for Mac blocks ads on more than just Safari.

 

[sprague.rod]

So it sounds like you have a handle on it now and I understand your confusion. Like all good anti malware, anti phishing, ad blockers it is fairly complicated and tries to cater to varied needs of different users. This means lots of options and preferences and really the only way to customise the app for your needs is to try each setting and see what happens. Of course this means you have to remember what you did.
As you discovered AdGuard for Safari is an extension (to Safari).
If you open Safari Preferences you will see a window with lots of tabs at the top. Go to the extensions tab and you will see all your current Safari Extensions, in my case I see 8 extensions for AdGuard but really they are just seperate elements of the one extension. Clicking once on any one will bring up a explanation of what it does on the right. You can also uninstall this feature in this window but it is better to just untick it in the left column, this will disable it, and see what the difference is.
Personally I have them all ticked and it doesn’t cause any loss of function for me but Safari is not my default browser.
Be assured this is a good app especially since it’s free and if Safari is your primary browser it’s probably all you will ever need. Note one of the items in the left column is the toolbar icon, if you click on that it explains how you can use it to change filtering preferences for any site you are on at the time. So if you are on say, Facebook, try turning off some or all filters, reload the page and note the changes. This will give you an idea of what AdGuard does. Good luck and stick with it.

 

[jparker402]

My purpose for an ad blocker was to try to reduce the frequency of getting the "beach ball" while surfing MSN.com. Since installing Catalina I have had a great deal of incidents of that. The Activity Monitor would show high usage and I was forever getting message on the screen that MSN had been closed or reset or something because of high memory usage. Have only had Adguard working for a short time now, but that has not come up since. Fingers crossed!!

 

[sprague.rod]

Well browsing on a media site is likely the most demand you can put on a web browser. Big high res images, audio, and off course ads and pop up windows so an adblocker would probably help. But at the end of the day it may come down to how fast your internet connection is.

 

[jparker402]

End of second day with Adguard, and my MacBook Air is still doing wonderfully well digesting MSN.com. Cutting out the ads has apparently significantly reduced CPU/memory usage.

 

[jparker402]

Today is Thursday. Since last night (Wednesday) I have been getting no ads but beachballs galore! Safari is exceedingly slow, jams, and Adware comes up saying it is not responding. Not sure what it is not responding to since the ads are still gone. Really don't know what to do. Guess I am going to have to get smart fast on interpreting what Activity Monitor might be telling me.