Safari extensions fail to activate.

[Alpha Centauri]

Mentioning from the beginning that I run a patched (dosdude) Catalina OS 10.15.7, as my hardware only officially supports up to ElCapitan.

I have Safari 15.6.1 installed and recently downloaded the App Wipr. The ext. however couldn't be activated (see screenshot). In fact, I did have the App Better already installed, accidentally unticked it, and received the same alert window in System Prefs. So now that also cannot be activated.

The Wipr Dev had already alluded that it may indeed not work on unsupported machines. I've tried activating within safe mode, other suggestions on the Dev help page here but no luck so far.

Any other work arounds that I could possible have missed?

Cheers

 

[Sheepish-Lord]

Dump Wipr and get the free Adguard extension in the App Store. Infinitely better.

 

[Alpha Centauri]

Dump Wipr and get the free Adguard extension in the App Store. Infinitely better.

Thank you for your reply. It's as I feared, also Ad Guard is blocked in the same way. It seems that the Apple APIs in this version of Safari and the system I'm running, prevent each and every extension from installing. Sure, there's FF but I'm finding memory swaps and system resources to be considerably kinder with Safari.

 

[Alpha Centauri]

@Sheepish-Lord an update. Came across an article of a Catalina bug (albeit 10.15.3) here, off course the Dev's end game is a sale of his own App in the Store.

As I've read a few times now, moving Safari System Prefs window, switching tabs, etc "may enable" activation of extensions. Surprisingly 6/8 AdGuard extensions are now, only through this intervention, enabled. The other ext. Wipr, Better, still won't activate. The 2 remaining excluded extensions from AdGuard appear to be ones with additional permissions. Could you please check if all 8 of yours are checked. That's the permissions of the 2 that won't activate for me at all:



So at least I've now got this:

 

[Sheepish-Lord]

Adguard Advanced check box is essentially what allows Safari to allow more than the 30K rules. It was something Adguard was working with Apple on and similar to what they had to do on iOS/iPadOS as well. You have a pretty old OS version so it may not support it but at least with Adguard the “general” filter is all you need for effective adblocking and has about 23- 27K rules I think.

 

[Alpha Centauri]

Adguard Advanced check box is essentially what allows Safari to allow more than the 30K rules. It was something Adguard was working with Apple on and similar to what they had to do on iOS/iPadOS as well. You have a pretty old OS version so it may not support it but at least with Adguard the “general” filter is all you need for effective adblocking and has about 23- 27K rules I think.

Right, initially thought they're paid add-ons. Interestingly also only have those 6 options actively installed on iOS15.7.

I'd love to still find out how to circumvent those extension options but lately maintenance of a patched OS is becoming a rapidly losing battle. Quite befitting the 'one step forward, two steps back' analogy here. This is after all 13yr old HW with last officially supported OS, 4 yrs ago. Nice project if it was all but the primary, and only machine.

Thank you for your recommendation re AdGuard.

 

[Alpha Centauri]

@Sheepish-Lord yet another update: Unrelated, created another user account. Safari notified that all other i.e. Wipr, Better ext are available and after confirming installation, they were all ticked.

Logging back into primary user account they no longer were and same behaviour as in my OP. It's not just about those ext but ability to activate any future ones also. I've gone through various Safari Prefs to replicate but no luck, it obviously has to be a setting in my admin account, somewhere.

I could delete Safari .plist but have quite a few Bookmarks, Reading Lists invested there. Any suggestions with this new information?

 

[bogdanw]

Manually enable Safari 14 extensions https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/manually-enable-safari-14-extensions.2261573/

 

[Alpha Centauri]

Manually enable Safari 14 extensions https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/manually-enable-safari-14-extensions.2261573/

Thank you for this link. I'll have a go when feeling brave again with Terminal and BBedit, hopefully thread's still active for a guiding hand.

Update: Initial trial only shows AdGuard entry under ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Safari/Data/Library/Safari/AppExtensions, so unsure if App name must be also then be replaced with whatever extension I'd like to activate?

Still puzzling that a fresh user account enables those extensions immediately, though my admin account issues those alerts. Theoretically it could be as I've set it up without granting access to iCloud and effectively there's minimal OS verification happening?

 

[bogdanw]

I would take a simpler approach: save my Bookmarks and delete the whole container.

 

[Alpha Centauri]

I would take a simpler approach: save my Bookmarks and delete the whole container.

Do you mean deleting: Library > Preferences > com.apple.Safari.plist OR ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Safari/Data/Library/Safari/AppExtensions

 

[bogdanw]

I was thinking about the whole container ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Safari/Data/Library/Safari/
but you can try to delete just
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Safari/Data/Library/Safari/AppExtensions
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Safari/Data/Library/Safari/SandboxExtensions.db-shm
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Safari/Data/Library/Safari/SandboxExtensions.db-wal
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Safari/Data/Library/Safari/SandboxExtensions.db
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Safari/Data/Library/Safari/WebExtensions

 

[Alpha Centauri]

@bogdanw thank you for taking the time to post those.

Being on a patched OS, I'll first have to knuckle down on additional backups before fudging too much in Safari. I'll report back once done.