@Cookies4Lunch: I love DDG, can't live without it, but inside Safari and not as an alternative to Safari. I think Safari and macOS (OSX), completed by Cookie 6 and Minim Safari extension, is the most secure browsing environment at all. And DDG works smoothly and full-featured as a simple website inside Safari. So, to make a long story short: I think, there's no need to use DDG as a separate browser on macOS (OSX). Just take Safari, Cookie and Minim – and your'e on the safe side.

And yet another feature request (proposal):

What about using wildcards also to include an IP range, e.g. 192.168.1.* or something even more detailed (e.g. 1-10,12-19) for local devices/resources? Lot's of devices in LAN/WLAN or VPN use browser based controls that could be handled more differentiated thanks Minim.

Sometimes I forgot to reactivate Minim after having it paused. For this, it would be helpful if the toolbar icon would indicate whether Minim is active or paused. It's just comfort, I know. But sometimes it just helps to avoid mistakes, especially when you are tired.

Aha, I see. Sounds reasonable. Thanks for the quick reply.

Sorry for the stupid question:

What exactly is the effect of activating or deactivating the "SVG documents" option in the rules?

You have now activated "SVG documents" in the settings of Minim as a "first-party-rule" by default (in contrast to v4.x), which seems plausible to me, since SVG documents probably do not pose a higher risk or potential interference than any other XML-based files.

But even if you block SVG documents, SVG images (as before) are still displayed, as long as at least images are activated.

That's why I don't quite understand what exactly you can block or allow with this option "SVG documents" (which wouldn't already be allowed by "images")?

Great job! Thanks!

• ️ Seems to work fine.
• ️ Main app and browser extension both show clear and simple UIs.
• ️ In browser extension, the popup text of the help symbol (?) should be changed from "open Minim" to "open Help".
• ️ Maybe for non-power users a short hint would be helpful that after update to v5 all rules need to be activated first by checking the new checkbox at the beginning of the line. (Otherwise one could think that Minim is running as before although all rules are not yet activated.)
• ️ After all, the help text is really understandable and easy to read with it's optical structure. Great!

Minim could become one of the most powerful tools to enforce generally strict browsing security settings by enabling precise exceptions.

The decisive factor here is not how simple or complicated the definition of a one-time rule is, but whether this rule will have a universal effect, e.g. by using wildcards, placeholders, regex… Especially aggressive websites or scripts will excessively make use of changes in URL structure and naming, just to block content blocker. So the more sophisticated the rules can be defined, the more universal it may work.

Whatever syntax you will use, it should be documented just "one click away" in a short overview, maybe with an additional help text incl. some examples below or beside. There won't be any confusion, if there's a clear explanation available. (The exact wording of a respective help text could be fine-tuned later, if necessary. And a reference to Minim's support forum could collect questions or feedback from users.)

If the syntax and behaviour of existing rules would change with a new version of Minim, there could be an issue with migration of old rules to a new syntax. So maybe it needs a warning or backup of existing rules or even a migration script. (Maybe later?)

Anyway, I'd prefer an automated iCloud backup (and/or local backup) of all changes to the exception list to remove changes step-by-step more easily. (Manual exports usually follow Murphy's law: outdated or not existing when you need it.)

@SweetP said in Wildcard Syntax:

Perhaps I should just accept regex…

I had an issue with one user who needed an exception for all those subdomains of podbean.com that start with letter "s" followed by a three-digit number, but no other subdomains, i.e.:

s###.podbean.com

I didn't even dream of Minim being so sophisticated one day that it could handle even such issues. But hey, maybe this day will come? Would be so GREAT!

Great job, as always. Thanks!

Does

*domain.com

affect to

my.domain.com

and also

mydomain.com

?

In other words: how to apply a wildcard to real subdomains only, instead of applying it to all other domains with a respective prefix within the domain name? Wouldn't it be more precise to accept a dot between the wildcard and the respective domain name, e.g.:

*.domain.com

What exactly is the meaning/behaviour of the first checkbox (something like "apply standard blocking rules to all domains" in English) at the General tab in Minim's settings?

Does it affect the rules/behaviour of listed (sub)domains or the application of rules to their secondary (i.e. third party) links?

Just want to understand, step by step, the general changes in behaviour after latest updates to 4.1.0~4.1.3, which appears to be a bit confusing to me.

Sounds good!

I just saved 100 € on a certain shop site by watching several sites over a longer period for a special offer of a product I was looking for.

The sites I watched didn't offer email or news feed alerts or other kind of notification. So Session Restore is the best way to repeatedly click through a large number of different sites within a few seconds only. Really a great and useful tool. Thank you, Russ!

Just tried to update to SR 1.53, too, to see what happens. However, the Mac App Store loads an empty file or something. Seems that Russ already stopped it? Quick reaction: half an hour or less! — Wow! Great!

(macOS 10.15.1, Safari 13.0.3)

@Timmy What about AdBlock for Safari?

The AdBlock for Safari App has got two Safari App Extensions: one for basic ad blocking functionality, and a second one (comes together with the app) that sets an icon in Safari to manage ad blocking details for every single page. With this icon (at least in older versions – I'm not sure whether or not it's still there.) you could block elements of the page like pictures, frames etc. from beeing displayed or printed. That seems to be exactly what you are looking for.

Hey Russel,

there's something that could heave up SR from a 4.99 to a 5.01 star rating: editing URLs within the SR app.

And to even top it all, you could create a little tool to import URLs and their referring tab names from the plain text output of the cells of a Numbers sheet, so we could automatically create URLs including all their variables (….html?X=xxx&Y=yyy etc.) in Numbers, and then export them to CSV that could be imported into SR. — It could have a price between, let's say, 2.99 or 4.99 €. (But, please, not such a price like EmailAddressExtractor which is definitely much too expensive. )

Great Job! Thx!