Safari Converter Changelog

All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file.

The format is based on Keep a Changelog, and this project adheres to Semantic Versioning.

2.1.1

Performance

Several important changes were made to the conversion code that allowed us to increase the library's performance by about ~4 times.

CPU profiler results before the changes:

CPU profiler results after the changes:

Here's how it was achieved:

Conversion logic does not use NSString anymore. In the past, when the library was initially developed, we discovered that the native String performance was far from ideal for tasks like parsing. Back then, we thought that the solution would be to switch to NSString, and it did partly help, although it was never ideal.

Since then, a lot of things have changed in Swift. String switched to UTF-8 storage and received quite a lot of performance improvements. Note that NSString is UTF-16 and keeping using it creates additional overhead because of that.

Now it's time to start using String again, but it still needs to be done very carefully to avoid spending extra time on reading graphemes instead of reading characters.

[!TIP] In order to keep parsing fast, we heavily rely on UTF8View. Users need to avoid extra conversion to UTF-8. Please make sure that the filter's content is stored with this encoding. You can ensure this by calling makeContiguousUTF8 before splitting the filter content into rules to pass them to the converter. If the String is already contiguous, this call does not cost anything.
Improved the way $badfilter rules are interpreted. The library was using a simple ineffective algorithm without any "indexing". Now $badfilter rules are grouped by the rule pattern, which significantly speeds up searching for a matching $badfilter rule.
Switched to one-pass algorithms in several places: NetworkRuleParser, SimpleRegex, SafariRegex, CosmeticRuleMarker, parsing $domain.
Replaced enum with OptionSet for handling NetworkRule modifiers and content types.

Added

Added $from as an alias of $domain: #60 (partly, yet to support $to)

Changed

Improved the domain.TLD implementation. There is still no full support for matching domain.TLD (although, in the future we'll be able to support it better), but it should still be better now. Instead of replacing .TLD with the seemingly randomly selected top 200 TLDs we now rely on the filters stats and we hope it makes this feature more useful.
Refactoring
- Removed SafariService; SafariVersion is now passed down to the underlying code instead of relying on a singleton.
- Removed allTests; it's not required anymore in modern Swift.
- Moved the logic from ConversionResult to Distributor.
- Improved unit tests, adding quite a lot of cases that were not covered by tests before.

Fixed

Improved Safari-compatible regular expression validation. In the past we relied on a set of simple validation regular expressions that were checking for known unsupported sequences. Now the check does not rely on any regular expressions (which made it much faster), but at the same time it is more thorough and careful. Check out SafariRegex to see how it's done.

v2.0.48

Added

Allow specifying the final CB JSON file size limit: #56

v2.0.43

Fixed

$match-case modifier does not work: #55

v2.0.40

Changed

Pseudo-classes :not() and :is() should be handled natively in the same way as :has(): #47

Fixed

Do not split rules with many domains in the unless-domain and if-domain: #51
Exclude rules containing if-domain and unless-domain with regex values: #53

v2.0.39

Fixed

Handling provided Safari version for minor version as well, not just the major one.

v2.0.38

Fixed

Handling provided Safari version.

v2.0.34

Fixed

Reverted native support of :has selector in the content blocker because Safari 16 is not supporting it yet. Corresponding bug.