SOLVAWhat it takes out
- AdvertisingBanners, pop-ups, video pre-rolls, native units The ones designed to look like the article you were reading.
- TrackingBeacons, fingerprinting scripts, email pixels The part you never see, which is most of what a page loads.
- InterruptionsCookie walls, newsletter pop-ups, notification prompts, “open in app” Not advertising, but the same tax on reading.
- WorseCrypto miners, anti-blocker walls and the scroll locks they leave behind Hiding the wall is half a fix; the page still has to move.
See it working, on this page
The boxes below are placeholders — nobody is paying for them. What is real are their names: the markup uses the same ids and classes advertising slots and cookie bars use everywhere else, so a blocker treats this page like any other. Nothing here hides them.
Open the full demonstration → Same idea, plus a button that sends about three dozen requests to real advertising and tracking servers when you press it, so you can watch those stop too. Nothing fires until you ask it to.
What happens after you install it
Safari ships content blockers switched off, so there is one minute of setup and Solva walks you through it.
Settings › Apps › Safari › Extensions — on iOS 17, Settings › Safari › Extensions; on a Mac, Safari → Settings → Extensions. Switch on everything named Solva. There are eight entries, because Safari caps how many rules a single extension may carry and Solva ships more rules than one can hold. The app counts the seven blocklists for you and says when they are on.
After that it is finished. Nothing to configure, no daily prompt, no account. If a site ever breaks, one screen stands Solva down on that domain alone — and offers to report it, so the correction goes into the filter list where it helps everyone rather than staying on your phone.
What it does not do
- No counterSafari blocks inside its own process and reports nothing back Any “ads blocked” figure would be invented. Solva measures one it can observe instead: the same page loaded twice, requests counted each time.
- No downloadsRules ship inside the app and change when it updates Nothing is fetched while you browse.
- No VPNNo proxy, no root certificate, no traffic of yours through anyone Blocking happens in Safari, using Apple's own mechanism, and nowhere else.
- No dealNo acceptable-ads programme Nobody can pay to be let through. An ad blocker funded by the advertisers it blocks is not one.
- No accountNothing to sign up for, and nothing of yours on a server of ours The app reports its own crashes and which of its screens get used — never an address you opened, and one switch in Settings stops it. The parts inside Safari have no network access at all. The privacy policy says exactly what is sent.
- No YouTube adsThe ads inside YouTube's player are beyond what iOS allows any blocker to reach Safari blockers can refuse a request by its address or hide an element by its selector. YouTube now sends its ads down the same path as the video, from the same addresses, so there is nothing to refuse that is not also the video — and Safari does not let a content blocker run code inside a page. Its trackers are blocked; the ads in the player are not, by Solva or by anything else on iOS.
The demonstration runs the same rule set this page describes, against the same advertising and tracking servers a real page would use — not stand-ins. Nothing on it is staged and nothing there is hidden by its own stylesheet: press the button and either the requests stop or they do not.