YouTube ad blockers for Safari on Mac

Short version

In Safari, only tools that replace the player get rid of YouTube's video ads. Content blockers can't, no matter how good they are at everything else.

So the field splits in two. AdGuard for Safari, Wipr, 1Blocker and the rest are excellent at banners, popups and trackers across the whole web, and worth having for that. None of them will stop a pre-roll. Two extensions will: Adios, which swaps in YouTube's own ad-free player, and Vinegar, which swaps in a stripped-back player of its own.

What actually works

Why content blockers can't touch YouTube ads

Two things stack up, and neither is fixable by configuration.

Safari's blocking is declarative. A content blocker hands WebKit a list of rules up front, and WebKit enforces them. The extension never sees your individual requests — which is great for privacy and battery, and useless for this. It can't make a decision about one request as it happens, or look at a video manifest, or work out that *this* segment is an ad and that one isn't. uBlock Origin's power on Chrome and Firefox comes exactly from that per-request filtering, which is why it doesn't exist for modern Safari at all.

YouTube's ads are first-party. The old assumption was that ads come from some other domain: block doubleclick.net, keep the site. YouTube's video ads come down the same pipeline as the video you asked for, from the same hosts, requested by the same player code. Any rule blunt enough to stop the ad stops the video too.

That's why so many people conclude YouTube ad blockers stopped working. The filter-list ones never really worked there. It's also why DNS blockers — Pi-hole, NextDNS, AdGuard DNS — can't help: there's no ad domain to refuse.

Adios or Vinegar?

Both replace the player. The difference is how much of YouTube you give up.

Adios puts YouTube's own embed player on the page, so the controls, the quality menu and the captions are all still YouTube's, and the watch page around it doesn't change. Vinegar swaps in a plain HTML5 player — deliberately minimal, very fast, and YouTube's player features are gone rather than reproduced. Some people much prefer that; it's a real design choice, not a flaw.

So: if you want YouTube minus the ads, Adios is closer to what you're after, and the free tier lets you check that on 30 videos before paying. If you actively want less YouTube in your YouTube, Vinegar is a solid app that's been around longer.

If you'll leave Safari

Then uBlock Origin in Firefox or Chrome is the best free option, full stop. It covers Shorts and live streams, which no Safari extension does, and it works across the whole web.

The price is your browser. No iCloud tab syncing, no Handoff, no Keychain integration, worse battery life, and a second browser running just for YouTube. If you're on a Mac because you like how it fits together, that's a lot to give up to avoid a $4.99 extension.

The other things people try

System-wide filtering. AdGuard's standalone Mac app and similar tools filter every browser and app at once. They get further than an extension can, at the cost of installing something that sees all of your network traffic. That's a real trade-off — pick a vendor you'd trust with that.

DNS blocking. Great for app telemetry and for cleaning up a whole household's network. Useless for YouTube video ads, for the reason above.

What I'd pick

For ad-free YouTube in Safari on a Mac: Adios. It's the only option that removes the ads and leaves YouTube's own player and page intact, it needs no filter lists and no system-level traffic filtering, and it's a one-off $4.99 after 30 free videos a month.

The caveats, in plain sight: Safari on macOS 13+ only, regular watch pages only, no Shorts, no live streams, nothing on your phone. If you need those, Premium is the only thing that covers them. And keep a content blocker for the rest of the web — Adios isn't trying to be one.