It lowers upkeep costs (as these services do not cost the host any money), and it speeds up the web in the sense that if you store a specific version of a file once, you will only contact that central content delivery service too see if the file you have is identical. There are a couple of reasons why web developers are tempted to do this. As the dev noted on a Reddit thread, “a lot of websites let you load vital files through large third-party services (like Google Hosted Libraries).

One example: I use DecentralEyes, which is available for Firefox/Chromium-apps for enhanced privacy when sites you visit simply track you via the CDNs used when loading pages. Why? Because there are numerous free Chrome extensions that have done this for years.Ĭhrome has a much larger variety of ad-blockers, and when applied to Chrome (or Brave) you get as good or better blocking as with Safari. One more: a few weeks ago the $3.99 Mac app Tabs To Links made a bit of a splash in the Maciverse, but it left me confused that people would pay for a Mac app (because Safari APIs don’t yet permits it to exist as an extension) to turn a Safari page’s links into a list of links. As just one example, there used to be (only) 2 extensions that let you see EXIF data on web pages, but not only were they much clunkier than Exif Viewer but newer versions of Safari broke those extensions several months ago, they never got updated, and now there isn’t a single EXIF viewing extension that works in Safari.

Safari is more locked down and the extension situation on Safari is fairly dire. As I mentioned earlier today, there are far more and far better extensions for Chrome/Brave than for Safari.

Brave firefox