People should be way more upset at the fact that Safari adblocking today is still inferior to even MV3 Google Chrome. Apple's implementation of declarativeNetRequest was semi-broken until the very latest iOS 18.6.
Apple can do the bare minimum, years after everyone else, and barely get called out. The Reality Distortion Field is the enemy.
Also funny that other devs had the gall to make people pay (sometimes subscriptions!) for Safari adblockers inferior to the free adblockers on any other browser.
Not too many sources I could find other than https://matisyahu.blog/2025/07/31/and-it-is-raining-again/ - but apparently the bug was so bad that any adblocker attempting to use declarativeNetRequest could break all Cloudflare websites for the user.
In the wake of Google finally sounding the death knells of Manifest V2, it's good to see Apple's at least making progress towards... parity with Google's MV3 feature set? Not the privacy leadership that Apple's known for, but progress is progress.
I agree with you regarding how Apple can do the bare minimum and barely get called out. But the fact is, I don't know of anything who's using declarativeNetRequest on Safari. The ecosystem of Safari blocking is centered around the legacy technology of content blockers from 2015. And the legacy technology works well enough that there's no pressure for either Apple or adblocker developers to adopt the new thing.
The legacy technology is also privacy-protecting in the sense that normal ad-blocking on iOS doesn’t use any third party JS filtering or reading of data on the page.
It breaks down because there are a ton of workarounds sites and ad-networks implement so it’s not super effective compared to MV2 ublock-origin
The privacy aspect is big. Even if content blocker extensions technically aren’t as capable, they were nice because they could be installed with impunity regardless of the party responsible for developing them. It’s a tradeoff.
In practice I’ve found them to be largely effective except for the most awful sites that I should probably be finding alernatives to instead of using (vote with your eyeballs), which is something I do even where “real” uBlock Origin is an option.
What’s the alternative? Using an Android phone with all of Google’s surveillance? A windows laptop with bad battery life, bloatware, and Microsoft’s increasingly bad dark pattern abuse? I feel like no matter what, consumers are screwed.
Screw Chrome; both Safari and Chrome are inferior to Firefox' adblocking toolkit
And for the record Ublock Origin used to have a Safari extension. But that was forced to be phased out a couple of OS updates ago for reasons I can't remember.
In any case, as someone who will not touch Google's spyware browser with a ten-foot pole, it's nice to have a flagship alternative to Firefox that does decent adblocking.
Yeah that Google Search Deal is a 36% revenue share agreement for ad revenue stemming from being the default search engine, presumably that includes visiting a search result and then interacting with ads upon that page.
The solution is trivial. Don't make Apple applications, don't use Apple products. Build for open protocols. Otherwise, go through life as if Apple didn't exist.
Apple's software is generally low quality with more bugs and less features than equivalent linux/oss software. There is a long list of 5, 10 - year old, well-known bugs that apple simply ignores. They know their userbase is built off of marketing and 'design', not product quality.
> Also funny that other devs had the gall to make people pay (sometimes subscriptions!) for Safari adblockers inferior to the free adblockers on any other browser.
That's absolutely perfect, and fits into the typical apple fangirl pattern that can be readily seen on hackernews - pseudo-technical people promoting some closed cute-looking macos app that's just objectively worse existing OSS alternatives.
I find it analogous to when financially successful people in their mid-life crisis stage decide to buy a 'nice' car, while not having any interest in cars previously. They invariably seem to end up with the the most flashy/marketed car, even though that car is objectively worse than another car for half the price. They will extol the car's virtue in a way that sounds like they are literally reading off of a marketing brochure, and actual car people just laugh at them.
So I tapped the link on my iPhone and was taken to the App Store.
The download button is available. Great! Finally I can block ads in mobile too.
It installs, opening it is a simple message saying I need to enable it in Safari settings. Strange, but ok.
I go to Settings -> Safari -> Extensions -> uBlock Origin Lite.
> “uBO Lite” is not available for this version of Safari.
This feels like a series of failures, why is it available for download on iPhone if it doesn’t work at all? Is iOS Safari really that different to Mac Safari?
> It installs, opening it is a simple message saying I need to enable it in Safari settings. Strange, but ok.
I’ve made several Safari extensions for iOS, and they all have to do this.
Apple provides no API for an app to enable its own Safari extension. It also has no public API on iOS to deeplink to the Settings page for enabling the extension. You just have to tell users where to go and hope they don’t get lost.
(There is an API on macOS to quickly open Safari extension settings. It’s nice! Maybe they’ll add it to iOS someday.)
> Why can’t extensions be a standalone thing in the store?
1) Because then you need a whole parallel set of processes for configuring, updating, and uninstalling those things, distinct from the existing processes for apps. And you need to make that process accessible to users who may be used to everything being an app.
2) A nontrivial number of browser extensions on iOS are part of standalone apps anyway, like password managers or bookmarking tools. It'd be very strange to have both app-with-browser-extensions and browser-only-extensions, or to require some extensions to be installed and updated in tandem with a companion app for expected functionality.
You'been answered already about the support periods in Android, but let me add more for you (and others mentioning support times of the system): in Android this problem doesn't exist to begin with. The fact that getting a new web browser version is anchored to getting a whole new operating system version, is preposterous and absurd, pure planned obsolescence from Apple. You would just upgrade your Chrome, Brave, Firefox, or whatever browser app, and do with them what your were trying to do. (in this case install a browser extension, for which the best one qould be Firefox).
This situation with iOS sounds as ridiculous as if it was mandatory to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 in order to update the Edge browser. (Edited to remove useless rant)
I don't know which version of the iPhone SE you have, there have been several over time. Mine is from 2016 (had to look that up). No update to iOS 18, true.
In your specific case you have to look very carefully in the Android world to avoid an even worse situation. I think there are a few Android models now that promise several years of updates, remains to be seen, though. If this is your beef with Apple, then I doubt you will feel much better with Android.
I've used Firefox Focus as an ad blocker for Safari on iOS for several years now. I don't actually use it as my browser, I just use Safari as normal, but it integrates with Safari, and seems to work well enough.
From what I can find, the original Wipr was released for iOS in Sep 2015 and the macOS version followed in Aug 2018.
Wipr 2 is a complete rewrite and was released in Nov 2024. So, in theory, for £1.99 you could've gotten 9 years of ad-blocking on iOS and for another £1.99 the same on macOS for 6 years.
And since this requires maintenance of the blocklists and associated code, I am totally fine with paying a small amount once every few years. And I'm not even forced to pay as the older versions usually continue to run - albeit on life support.
yea...I in theory would be excited about ublock coming to safari but Wipr is working so well I'm kind of reluctant to change...I do want to support gorhill working on MacOS though...
Good! Wipr was very cheap, so was Wipr 2, if paying a tiny fee every few years for a well-made app that does its job well keeps the developer in business and able to keep maintaining it, then I'm happy to do it.
That said, I'm not actually convinced there will be a Wipr 3, at least not without some significant change to the ecosystem first. Wipr 2 was a complete rewrite of Wipr, there's no reason to expect it will need yet another complete rewrite.
Try Brave browser on iOS, it cuts everything irrelevant without third-party apps, and you also get background media playback on locked screen (settings toggle) on youtube as "one more thing".
Extensions for Safari on iOS and iPadOS have been available since 2021, I’ve been using ad blockers on those systems, but it’s nice the have uBlock now.
Trying to actually write one before, it's incredibly frustrating experience, as you still need to have some weird native glue code in in Swift/Obj-C. And everything is under-documented, as it the true Apple Experience. (I forgot the details. I can find the code on github, maybe.)
If you ask yourself why there are so little Safari extensions, this is why.
edit: I look at the code now... I needed to wrestle with BOTH cocoapods and npm, at which point I gave up
in my repo. Then I opened xcode, configured the signing/capabilities, and built it. IIRC I had to create the directory for the output because xcode didn't do it itself, but once that was done I could install it to both macOS and iOS. Honestly I was surprised it was so little effort. I don’t doubt that an extension with more functionality than mine might require a jumping through a lot more hoops, but it definitely can be easy to successfully target Safari IME.
This doesn't work for phones that are limited to earlier iOS versions. Content blocking was available to developers all the way back to iOS 9. Why would these guys deliberately limit their software to only the latest versions?
There was also bugs in the declarative net request implementation that was also just recently fixed - quite a few bugs have been holding uBlock back. The reason why uBlock hadn't come sooner was because DNR hadn't been implemented which would have required the developer to go out of their way to specifically re-write uBlock Origin to work with Apple's content blocking API but now Apple has implemented DNR it should open up the possibility for more choice in the content blocking extensions market.
So you never got gatekept by Apple from accessing a feature unless you had a specific version of the OS? Heck, even macbooks get killed every year by not allowing them to build for newer iOS versions.
The whole point of Apple, one could say, IS to make sure to forcibly make you update to access a new feature. That way either you can update or you've got to buy a brand-new device.
I'm curious what you believe the alternative is - "new features magically appear in released versions of an operating system without the software being updated"?
You're being disingenuous. There is more to an operating system than a kernel; new features in Linux software frequently require supporting software or libraries to be updated.
No, the App Store allowing you to download an app with an extension target that doesn’t match the current system. At the very least there should be a warning or a button to update iOS if that’s possible on the current device.
Choice and platform fragmentation in one neat bundle. I am almost surprised that Apple doesn't just force updates on everyone when it is possible just to maintain that additional bit of uniformity and conformity for its "think different" crowd.
>The whole point of going iPhone is not to have to deal with these kinds of situations.
This is actually really funny because Android users have had the ability to use any browser they want for like a decade+, including browsers with adblock built in, and browsers with fully featured extension systems supporting all major desktop ad blockers, and it all just works. One click download, no setup, nothing.
This is one of those places where Apple has intentionally made a terrible UX for you to steer you into their walled garden / first party products. You have to use Safari, you have to dig around in settings, you have to make sure your versions all line up, it's pointless rigamarole that will mean the majority of users stick with stock Safari, just as intended.
In many ways, things "just work" on any platform Apple product managers aren't allowed to muck with...
I just searched within the (edit: iOS App Store) App Store app for
ublock origin lite
“ublock origin lite”
For the unquoted search, there are twelve different apps/items returned above it - you really have to scroll down to find it at number 13.
Even for the quoted search, it’s returned in fourth place.
More interestingly the second time I searched with quoted it’s in third place, and the third time of searching the sponsored items at the top is getting even more random.
It is mind-boggling, how in this day and age search functions can still be soooo bad in so many places on the web and inside applications. At the very least a 100% substring match should be very visible in the result. If not at the top, then there should be sorting criteria, to make it appear at the top, so that one can sane-ify the search result, when it is not sane.
A good example for bad search is the windows start menu. If you just logged in and the system is still loading (whatever it is doing all that long...) and you press the super key and then start typing, it might be too slow to find things _locally on your disk_, and might start searching online. When you have developed an automatism and just continue typing and then hit enter/return key, you will get some online shit result shown in Edge or some Microsoft store shit, instead of simply launching your already installed app. A critical race right there in the start menu. It's baffling.
Recently, there was a reddit post about a KDE menu search thing just as silly. It would not prioritize the title/name of an app, but instead, after typing 3 or more characters, find a word in the description of a launcher/starter of other apps and show those first, even though the 3 chars or more are a perfect substring of the name of an app.
People reinvent simple search and make silly searches over and over again. One of the main criteria is, that a substring match must lead to being high in the results, if not the top result. Shorter wins vs longer, because the match has higher percentage of match with the full title/name. Beginning of the string matched? Higher in results. All very basic things, that shouldn't be difficult to implement.
It helps to realize that the search is less of a tool for you to find information and more of a tool to show you an ad targeted on your search query. That's why ads are the top results and the organic data you wanted is after the fold. You're asking an ad company for information, and you don't expect an ad as a result? They are only continuing to show the organic results to tease you into coming back..
The original comment was about Apple's App Store. I assume there are financial ways to get your App "featured" there or something like that but as far as I know, you can't financially take direct influence on whatever logic Apple uses to sort search results there. Yet, it can still be spectacularly difficult to find an App - even if you type in its exact name, as indicated by OP (can confirm from my experience).
If you have a theory about what Apple's motivation to actively serve such bad results could be, I'd be interested to hear it. I've always sort of assumed that the root cause for this is some combination of neglect on Apple's part and attempts at gaming the system by developers (I don't know much about developing for the App Store, but I presume there are forms of SEO-like activities that can be done in attempts to bump up your app).
Most ad sales platforms have auctions for ad slots and/or keywords. If you want to game the system and have money to burn as growth hacking, you can place a larger value in those auctions/keywords to win a chance at your ad being placed in front of more eyeballs. When it comes to apps/games especially, people will chose whatever is posted from laziness, fomo, or just tired of looking and picking the easy route. I suspect that when you get an unrelated ad to your search, it's because someone else was willing to spend more money for those search terms than someone with more relevant matches. It's always going to be about those Benjamins.
I get that it's always be about money in the end but I understand this sub-thread to be a bit more specific: Is there an ad sales platform run by Apple where your Benjamins have influence on the search ranking in the App Store? I and many other people here are not talking about things that are clearly ads (like a "featured" result or the ads shown by google and other search engines).
Why do people continue asking this question? Why do people think Apple is not collecting data to serve ads? Do they not remember being asked about it when setting up their devices when the ask if you want to share or not? Have they not seen the privacy options about Apple's ad network? Is it actual ignorance or head in the sand?
The search in Google Messages on Android is completely useless too. It seems like it only searches within the past few days or something, if I try searching for something from a while back it never finds it. And they removed the feature to quickly scroll back to a date in the past, so the only way to dig up old texts is to manually scroll back in a conversation and hope you find it. It's absolutely ridiculous that the search is so bad when it's an app by Google of all companies.
That's funny because iMessage search works quite well if you can find it buried in the interface. I have a feeling Apple themselves forgot it exists and hasn't gotten around to 'modernizing' it with AI yet.
Even funnier is, it was obscenely bad for years, and then it made a sudden jump to “pretty darn good”. My headcanon is that someone high-up at Apple tried to search for a message, noticed how broken it was, and then assigned an entire engineering department to work on nothing else than iMessage search for two weeks.
Now it feels like a cheatcode, at least when it comes to verbatim searches (probably because the entire message database is now indexed, if I had to guess).
Seriously, try searching for the letter “e” and click “View All”. You will get effectively every message you’ve ever sent or received, in a single, reasonably scrollable list. For me it dates back to 2018.
I personally sent several scathing emails directly to directors about the issue. I have a long iMessage history and there was a point that just entering a single character in the search field would lock up my mac, let alone my older iPhone.
I have noticed and appreciate the change, so my headcanon is that they actually do read feedback. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If you type the name of the person, it should allow you to create a filter for "Messages with: Person". It should also pop up a filter bubble for photos. From there I think you can type in some query and it should do a query on the photos via text. I don't think you can add your date filter though.
Second way would be to open that conversation view, click on the contact icon at the top of the view, which should then bring you to a details page that lists a bunch of metadata and settings about the conversation (e.g. participants, hide alerts, ...). One of the sections shows all photos from that conversation. Browse that until you find the one you care about.
> The search in Google Messages on Android is completely useless too.
It's literally all Google products. They've just simplified and contextualized and added other things over the years such that if you're not searching for something already above the fold then it won't show up.
When I was using Gmail I had an email with important information that I needed about once a year. I knew the exact subject and who it was from but it would never show up in search. It was my only starred email so I could find it on demand.
Part of the reason I pay for Shortwave is because its basic search is so much better than Gmail's. I don't even use the LLM except for more descriptive searches, which it is also quite good at.
KDE search is super good, if you're referring to krunner. It searches everything, bookmarks, open tabs, filenames, paths, and even file contents. And it's really fast.
You have to turn the file indexer on or install it if you don't have it. Try `baloo status` or `baloo6 status`. Poke around in setting too so you can index what you need and not temp files.
The search is pulling from a bunch of sources in a particular order and returning results as it finds them probably. I wouldn't expect it to be anything sinister.
Indeed, it's called Plasma Search, available in system settings. Providers can be enabled, disabled, and configured at will. I can't imagine it would be all that difficult to code your own and get it hooked up in there, if you were so inclined. Personally I just unchecked everything except "Applications" and I use it like a quick launcher. Works great for my purposes.
I use it exactly like that too. It's too jarring to get anything else in the results for me and while I can't imagine why anyone would include any other source, to each their own.
>It is mind-boggling, how in this day and age search functions can still be soooo bad in so many places on the web and inside applications
Not really, if you understand how modern search algorithms work.
Pagerank[1] relies on link analysis -- you see who links to whom, and combine that with information on the traffic each site gets to suss out which sites are more likely to be sought out.
None of that data is available when you're searching through your local hard drive -- you have to use basic search operators like AND, OR, or use negation (Eg: "Star Wars -film" to find information on the space laser thing)
Unfortunately, we don't train folks on how to search anymore, so when "the algorithm" doesn't produce what they are looking for, folks have no ability to conduct their own search.
Ok, this is too good. When I clicked on the App Store link, it opened the App Store and a "What's New" dialog popped up and the only thing highlighted was "Improved Search".
I watched an elderly mathematics professor manually type a full URL into the windows search box, complete with "https", and I thought to myself "surely that won't work" and lo and behold...
You mean he searched for a URL and received something that was an exact match as his sole result? Sounds like the search worked perfectly.
What do you think should've happened? The search say "I know what you're searching for, but I refuse to help because your dumb ass should've typed this into a web browser address bar?"
This isn't 1995. Computers have access to the Internet, and there's no reason your computer's search bar should only search local.
Now, if he'd had a file with that as its name, and a text document with that URL, I would've expected those first. Maybe not at first. Depends on disk space allocated to indexing.
I didn’t mean to elicit hostilities, my comment is in the context of the parent comment where they are discussing displeasure with the web search results coming from the Windows search bar. As a more technically literate user, I would prefer for no web results except from my web browser, but I was sharing a corollary to that.
Not to stick up for the search in the app store, but I don't think it is necessarily that straightforward, particularly where there is money to be made by gaming the ranking.
Tangent; put lists in alphabetical order! Or some other order which makes sense to the user in the context, like date, or priority. Something which is not unordered, coincidence, whatever the hashtable or nosql DB produced, order of creation when that isn't an important ordering in the domain, some internal or even visible GUID.
Worse if there's no filter, worse if it's a dropdown and there's no way to type the desired name, only look.
Seriously, especially when the substring is in the title or filename. Google drive searching is infuriating for that. It will pull up barely related documents to my search term that has the word buried in the content, and not even show the file that has my search term verbatim in the filename or title. If there's one company I expect a really great search experience with, it's Google, and yet it's been this way for years and years...
Its great for the app store if people mistakenly download the wrong app. They can increase the total downloads stats for more than one app that way. And it creates more "engagement' with the app store. They don't care that it's "forced" engagement
>It is mind-boggling, how in this day and age search functions can still be soooo bad in so many places on the web and inside applications.
You mean to say that you think they just somehow forgot to optimize these fundamental things to work well? No.... If the search functionality provided by an otherwise highly capable, ultra-rich tech company is an utter piece of shit, it's intentional. The optimization is elsewhere, while the users are left stuck with a deformed excuse.
Anyone downvoting feel like instead explaining their reasoning? Or just how search can be such utter shit in certain contexts, despite often being developed by companies like Microsoft, Apple, and even fucking Google of all things?
I just searched for uBlock. Top result is an ad for another ad blocker. Second result is an ad blocker called "Ublock", with "Origin" in its tags; a clear scam whose purpose is to leech off the reputation of uBlock Origin and trick people.
Apple's App Store is chock full of scams like this. It's not just bad search, it's a failure to enforce any kind of anti scam policy (combined with seemingly intentionally terrible search).
> god forbid you have the word Android somewhere in your app
I literally have an app installed on my iPhone called “Android TV” (a remote to control android smart TVs, which I used to have years ago), and it says “Connect to Android TV” in giant header typeface on the app homescreen.
Searching for “Android” on app store brings up even more apps containing that word in the name and in the app, including third-party non-Google apps.
We have an app for our platform and that app has a news section, we were rejected because we had news about Android devices. We are at this point providing a filtered news list where items with certain keywords are excluded on Apple devices. Maybe it's because of the app category.
Apple’s App Store makes so much revenue (mainly through the slightly more legit scams like gacha games, but plenty through weekly subscriptions for outright scam apps too) that there are many incentives for that team to never clean this up.
It’s a huge driver of what Apple pushes as the future of the company: services. It has been this way for more than a decade now: "What the hell is this????Remember our talking about finding bad apps with low ratings? Remember our talk bout becoming the 'Nordstroms' of stores in quality of service?“ - Phil Schiller in 2012 (https://www.imore.com/hilarious-phil-schiller-email-reveals-...)
The problem is that people like us use Homebrew (and tell our families to), so there’s little incentive to complain loudly about this issue. Browser extensions and the occasional one-off app are the only reasons to go there.
Why do people think a browser is safe to use? Why do people think any app is safe to use? Why do people think a website is safe to use? Why do people think an OS is safe to use? Why do people think a driver is safe to use? Why do people think a firmware is safe to use? Why do people think a hardware device is safe to use? Why do people think the chips inside are safe to use? Why do people think an ISP is safe to use?
If you have a point to make about it being particularly unsafe or different from any other internet/software trust, make that point. Otherwise you know well enough that there isn't any other option but trust, and people generally trust stuff until given a good reason not to.
The point is that Safari's extension system requires using the App Store, not that it's inherently safer. In some ways, the "App" model that Safari uses could be more unsafe, regardless of Apple's code review.
Nonetheless, a critical engagement of software "safety" would require another few thousand words, at least.
Yes. Spotlight search for the Application launcher use-case was close to the speed and quality of LaunchBar (which still works that way of course) when Apple first introduced the command-space shortcut, on vastly slower “oughts” computers. Today it’s much slower and less consistent.
However we know that they could easily do a simple search effectively because Apple’s Launchpad has a perfect app search built in. If you give Launchpad a global shortcut you can press <shortcut>saf<return> and be assured it will instantly open safari every time. Of course, LaunchBar (no affiliation, but I’ve been using it for 22 years) still beats that in every way.
My favourite was back in os7. I didn't really use the file system because you just started typing the name of the file and it came up instantly. I'm not sure why companies have to break simple stuff that works well.
MacOS to me started to regress ~2012. I can’t remember what specific release it was, but one major MacOS release around then no longer remembered my MacBook’s external monitor layouts between work and home anymore and it was always “random”.
Spotlight, AirTunes/Airplay, iTunes, etc all also just slowly degraded. It’s like Steve Jobs was personally doing all QA and it just stopped when he died. I remember iTunes genius being SO GOOD that it cost me a fortune in song purchases, but now that apple just gets my monthly music payment, discovering new music is hard again.
Eh, as a person then uses both occasionally... I feel like they're pretty on-par?
Is the osx search performing so much better on your end? If so, in results or speed? Because for me, both osx and windows searches leave me annoyed anytime I try to use them, it's so bad that I usually prefer to use CLI tools on both platforms ...
On the azure win11 desktop I am using professionally (only windows I use) a large fraction of the time you can't even search anything because the windows menu just freeze.
Same for me, But OSX seems to have a similar issue at least on my MacBook Pro M1.
I occasionally get the multicolor disk spinner which locks all UI interactions for a few seconds (10-30s) until it unfreezes and works as before again...
Haven't been able to figure out the exact cause for it, feels very random.
Don’t do that! You’ll be left behind by society— rendered penniless and fatally inconvenienced by the lack of tooling to exponentially improve your productivity!
I know that occasionally, the Spotlight index can get corrupted, and you have to manually delete it and let it regenerate. If you search for that with your current OS version, you should be able to find some decent instructions for it.
(My guess is that the Windows issue is something similar? but I have no experience with it, so don't know if it can be fixed in a similar way)
While it’s clearly not everybody, in my and a number of other users’ personal onedrives, search hasn’t worked since May. Zero results for any search in any context. No response from MS other than essentially “yep! Sorry! Working on it! Promise! In the interim, try just remembering where everything is maybe! lol!”
I’m sure there’s some indexing thing I could take care of, but windows edges out spotlight for me for both ineffectiveness and slowness on every machine I use. For me, windows used to be far better than spotlight. It’s strange to me how much better the command line tools do essentially the same job, and that, anecdotally, the GUI ones seem to be getting worse?
They definitely are bad at search. When I type “safar” into iOS settings, it says “no results for “safar”” while it looks for the fucking built-in browser’s search page.
Weird. I get lots of relevant results with Safari at the top. Which somehow makes it a little worse: I’d naively think we should get identical results.
I can never find my emails on Mac. Even worse if they're organized in folders. I just want a universal search: contains text, sort by age, I don't care about other filters....
This doesn't really make Apple look better, but a huge part of it is surely how recent the Ublock Origin app for iOS is. New apps take time to propagate and become good responses. Which makes sense, you wouldn't want someone else to be able to instantly cover Ublock Origin itself with a copycat app (not that it doesn't happen anyway).
Honestly, even Google search with "terms reddit" is better than Reddit's own built-in search. That says a lot.
Same deal on may mac. Unless I know the exact file name, Finder search is useless. Spotlight will happily surface a PDF from 2017 before showing the text file you saved yesterday.
Which brings me to the question: why is search so hard?
Why use an app store. Is Apple more trustworthy than the author of this app. Think about it
The company continues to increase its advertising services revenue. In terms of protecting computer buyers from advertising and associated surveillance, one could reason that its interests are conflicted
App store "search" has always been a joke. It has never been suitable for app "discovery". The company would rather computer owners select from lists of recommended apps
I needed to add search to my own website. I wanted it to be local search (the titles for the documents are all available locally). I tried several different popular 1000s of stars JavaScript search libraries. All but one failed on simple searches. Like if the title was "See Spot Run to the Park" and my search was "Park" or "Run" this title would not be listed as a result and titles with neither word would appear. I reported the issues, they were ignored as "working as intended". Not sure why anyone uses these libraries. I suspect they don't actually test. The plug them in, it appears to work at a glance, and they ship it.
I'm talking about Fuse.js, FlexSearch.js, etc.... I don't remember which other ones I tried but was shocked out bad the results were
no. At a glance it appears to be create an index at site build time. That's not what I needed. I needed to search user document titles (different for every user). Those document titles are synced to local storage. So not a build time thing
Same. It never used to show them. It only started recently. But it's only partially letting some ads through. Youtube video ads are still blocked which is good.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I too get the same for Mac apps, but for iOS apps still see the same competitor results returned first.
For me, that's the same whether I use the App Store from my phone, or laptop.
Some commenters are presenting a conspiracy theory about how Apple is intentionally sabotaging App Store search, perhaps with the goal of maximizing App Store search ad revenue. I think the empirical evidence, covering all examples of Apple search, points to incompetence rather than malice. Money does factor in, but again, not in a conspiratorial way: rather, Apple simply has no monetary incentive to fix their own incompetence. It's complacency rather than conspiracy. This is what happens with monopolies and duopolies: they've already got essentially a captive audience, so they no longer need to put in the effort to compete. They just "phone it in", so to speak.
I don't think that Apple wants a bunch of scams in the App Store. But when developers and users are practically throwing money at Apple, no matter what Apple does or doesn't do, and "services" margins are 70%, there's a great temptation to pocket the profits and shrug.
For another example of how Apple is bad at search, look at the Settings app. Awful. But again, it's not sabotage. That would be silly and pointless. It's just pure and simple incompetence and complacency.
I agree fully about how they have proven their incompetence, but let’s imagine you are a PM there and you pitch a feature “Fixing App Store search using well-known strategies and techniques”
I can’t imagine that especially Tim Cook’s Apple is naive enough to not realize that’s going to dent ad revenue, since most developers have to buy ads directly because of the current flaws. So it seems like that project won’t be approved because your boss and their boss are going to know that you’ll be losing Apple a ton of sweet, sweet pure-profit revenue if you succeed. If it would make Apple 100 million dollars in profits to fix it, especially for a neatly encapsulated problem like App Store, where it wouldn’t be that disruptive to just rip and replace the search engine, Apple would just fix it.
All the Mac and iPhone search incompetence, it’d be revenue neutral to fix, and not lend itself to flashy advertising like “liquid glass” does, so that’s why that’ll never happen.
> most developers have to buy ads directly because of the current flaws.
I wouldn't say it's because of the flaws. It's because of the design: regardless of how well search works, the top hit is always an ad. At best, even with search working perfectly, a search for your own app would return your app as the #2 hit at highest. The search ad system still incentivizes developers to buy ads for searches of their own app, if only as a defensive measure to prevent other developers from inserting their apps at the #1 spot. And Apple makes money, and you pay money, if App Store users click on your own ad for your own app at the #1 spot rather than the "free" search result at the #2 spot.
Oh yeah, and you can't block App Store search ads with an ad blocker. Consider how the App Store is entirely native and has no web-based purchases or downloads.
I hear you, and agree that is true. But consider this angle:
Without buying an ad, but with a competent organic search:
Customer searches "Ublock origin". Results: (This is actually a real life test)
1. (Ad) Adblock Pro for Safari
Note: The rest are actual organic "results"!
2. Brave Browser & Search Engine (WTF?)
3. Ublock: Ad Blocker, Speed Test
4. Firefox Focus: Privacy Browser
5: Same as #1 but organic
6: AdGuard
I gave up trying to find actual Ublock Origin Lite in these results, but I did install it on my phone earlier so it must be in there somewhere.
A working search would have Ublock Origin Lite as #2 after the ad. If I'm Ublock Origin Lite, I might be satisfied with this and trust that anyone who isn't too easily distracted should be able to find me right there above the fold. So I'd be less likely to buy an ad than I am in our real world. #2 isn't as good as #1, but it's good enough for a lot of people. Combine this with not allowing people to infringe trademarks in their keywords or whatever shenanigans is going on above, and the App Store would be a lot less of a scamware cesspool. And boy, do scams pay well!
Apple Podcast search never fails to enrage me. There's no way to search within a specific show, just all your followed shows at once. Even if you know the exact episode title, if it has common words in it, you'll get a stream of garbage. It treats any match in the episode description with the same weight as an exact match of the episode title. So I have to go on the web, search the specific podcast to figure out the date, then just scroll to it in Apple Podcasts.
If anybody is interested, the original (not lite) firefox-version of uBlock Origin works just well in Orion (webkit based browser by kagi) in both iPhone and Mac. It is great to have it for safari though anyway as safari is the default browser in these platforms.
I love, LOVE Orion. Use it both on iPhone and Mac. However, lately, it's becoming more and more buggy and sluggish. Writing this in Orion though - just have to quit it a few times a day to battle the RAM consumption and sluggishness. So yeah, like the other person says: DEFINETELY still beta. And yes, I report the issues.
Yeah, I am mainly using firefox on desktop, but orion on the phone because this is the only way to get extensions on ios. I do have crashes once in a while in certain websites. It is annoying, but, for me personally, being able to use certain extensions (ublock, dark reader etc) makes it worth the occasional crash.
I’ve found this to be the case, but I absolutely do not consider this acceptable. It’s just uncontrolled memory use. I also experience this on Safari though, so I suspect it’s a WebKit issue.
I've been using this browser for several months now. I think it's the best option if you want access the addons that are available in Firefox for Android. However, the browser is definitely still beta. I often encounter bugs, mostly with tab behavior. These are still pretty manageable though, and worth the tradeoff to me.
I've been using Adguard for a couple years and have had no problems. I think I've only seen ads slip through a couple times. If there's anyone who's able to compare, is there any real difference between these ad blockers?
AdGuard always bothered me. On macOS it sits in the menubar and has about a half dozen extensions that load into Safari. It felt like a bloated sprawling mess. I just installed uBOL and it's a single extension that sits in Safari. It feel much more clean and unobtrusive.
Absolutely not. They are trying to protect you, can you imagine how awful Safari would be if it let you sideload such nasty extensions? It would be just like Chrome, absolutely no market variation to speak of! Despicable.
It's really AdGuard's fault for failing to fit their functionality within the arbitrary constraints Apple decided was suitable for a runtime.
Chrome's decision is also entirely arbitrary, so it's not a great example. Firefox on mobile notable supports Chrome extensions, without any real issues or battery drain whatsoever.
That’s in fact one of the gripes I have with certain MacOS software. It would be far better if menu bar icons were opt-in rather than opt-out. The average non-technical user eventually ends up having tons of these icons in the menu bar.
The existence of a menubar icon as an option implies it’s a service that needs to run all the time. I compare that perception to what uBOL mentions in the App Store description.
> uBOL is entirely declarative, meaning there is no need for a permanent uBOL process for the filtering to occur, and CSS/JS injection-based content filtering is performed reliably by the browser itself rather than by the extension. This means that uBOL itself does not consume CPU memory resources while content blocking is ongoing -- uBOL's service worker process is required _only_ when you interact with the popup panel or the option pages.
AdGuard Home has no "store". You download it yourself. I believe the same is possible for the Safari plugin - they're not required to be obtained from the App Store.
Adguard is still better because it ships multiple extensions that you can enable to bypass filter limit on iOS. uBlock Origin Lite is not able to block annoying Google sign in pop ups, yet.
i've also been using adguard for years. Yes it's paid, but it actually works. I use it on mac and ios. none of the free( at the time) ad blockers worked as well. or they constantly needed updates, or certain things broke etc. adguard is a great product. not affiliated, not sponsored, just a user.
Thanks for asking this. I have always had Adguard on iOS with no issues wondering if there is any extra benefit to switching to uBlock Origin Lite on Safari.
It's been a few years since I've used an Iphone, but back then I used AdGuard. It wasn't terrible, but I encountered frequent breakage, and updating it (rules) was miserable and slow.
The generally awful and sad state of web browing on IOS was a big reason why I switched to Android.
Weird, it's installed but it won't let me enable it in Safari. The "enable" checkbox is inactive. Safari 18.5 on MacOS Sequoia 15.5. Restarting the browser, and reinstalling the extension has no effect.
This makes me think that UBO Lite wasnt possible without something Apple added in the latest version. Is this true? Did they finally add something to Safari allowing UBO Lite to finally be made? Is that why UBO Lite for Safari didnt exist until now?
Had no problem finding and downloading it from the AppStore; then again, it's been ten hours since you posted, so maybe it has only just popped up in the last couple of hours for people in the Netherlands.
That's not a feature I'm required to use on Android, MacOS, Windows or Linux. If it's not Apple's decision to enforce it then I wonder who would degrade the experience like that?
I've been puzzled reading previous discussions about Safari where people acted as if it doesn't have good ad-blocking, just because the brand name extension they're familiar with wasn't available. There has been very good ad-blocking available on Safari for a long time (both macOS and iOS) using for example AdGuard.
Ad blockers on Safari effectively have the same weaknesses as ad blockers on Chrome now have since the deprecation of the blocking webRequest API (which Safari never supported).
It was a fork. I'm not sure what you mean exactly by "unofficial". Gorhill said at the time that he didn't have time to maintain a Safari version, but he was aware of the fork, which mostly shared code with upstream, and seemingly endorsed the fork.
As I understand it, AdGuard uses (in addition to a browser extension) a system-level local network proxy so can do anything to requests and responses?
Confusingly, there are 3 offerings: "AdGuard for Mac", "AdGuard for iOS" and "AdGuard for Safari" and I think it's the first 2 that are the good stuff, even for Safari.
It's been possible for about a decade to use Firefox Focus as a Content Blocker for Safari. I assume it's open source, "well trusted" is of course subjective.
I thought the whole point of iOS and macOS content blockers is that it does not have to be trusted, since there is never any data flowing out, only a list of blocked IP addresses that the operating system refers to (like a windows hosts (file).
My experience has been that installing AdGuard on my iPhone made no noticeable difference. To be fair, I barely browse on my phone. Basically only news sites and Reddit/HN. But apart from HN I see ads on all of those pages.
So I am just a puzzled by your point of view :) May I ask which App you are using? I would love to be proven wrong and have an ad-free browsing experience in the future.
Not sure what to troubleshoot with AdGuard, but from consulting mine that's working well, I'd ensure that both "Safari protection" and "Advanced protection" are enabled in its app, and that all of its Safari extensions in the system Settings app are enabled (and the main one is set to "All Websites: Allow").
Ah thanks! I only have Safari protection enabled, the advanced one requires me to pay (though I don't remember that from when I installed it a couple of months ago).
Saw someone else in this thread mention the Orion browser - I will give that a try for now. If I'm not satisfied I'll try paying for AdGuard. Thanks for the reply though!
Adblocking as links bloking can be sufficient, but sometimes you need to bring the big guns and alter the page content itself. Safari has even "Hide distracting elements" now, which can not be an extension. That cements the idea that most uBlock Origin features should be part of the browser to make it a wonderful user agent.
It's been possible to use Content Blockers for Safari for a long time, which alters the page content. Firefox Focus came out about a decade ago, and can be used as one.
There's a reason why this is uBlock Origin Lite and not uBlock Origin. Still works, but can't do the same thing as the extension for Firefox (desktop), for example.
Would you be supportive of an "adblock test page" that literally just reports if the adblocker is working correctly, rather than how good it is? Like maybe an EICAR-like rule that is added to EasyList that matches an element on that page?
I just tested with Firefox and uBlock Origin in the stricter "medium mode" and got a score of 1%. So yeah, I don't think these test pages are that great.
I'm using AdGuard with Mac Safari and I get 96%. Perhaps this is a configuration issue. But if that site doesn't test for false positives, which it doesn't seem to, I'd say the result is pretty meaningless.
It says on the page that ublock origin breaks the results. Now that might be the full firefox version but in my test with Firefox the result was 1 blocked on the page but 125 on the extensions own notification.
Must depend on your block lists, I get a 98% using AdGuard on iOS. I'm using easy list, easy privacy, fanboy annoyances and social filters, and hagezi's light dns filter. I'm a big fan of ublock but I don't see much issue with AdGuard for now.
I get the best of all worlds by using Orion, I can use uBlock Origin (the Firefox version) and also get WebKit which Safari uses. Orion seemed unstable for me, but I gave it another shot a couple of months ago, and it has been as stable as Safari for me. Glad to hear someone gave Safari another AdBlock alternative though, the more, the merrier.
I don’t know. I have tried to use Orion for long time but it has too many bugs. I try it like few times week. Also, this extension seems to work better than uBlock in Origin.
Using an ipad on the internet is so incomprehensibly bad without adblocking that I just don't even use it for normal browsing. The problem is I would rather use a website instead of an app because at least I can adblock the website (sans pihole or something). It was actually making me consider going back to an android tablet but here is a potential solution. Except it is not supported for my version of Safari (for now?). Awesome.
Looking forward to try it once it becomes available in my region. Although I wish I could just use extensions on iOS Firefox… Or at least have a way to sync my bookmarks between Firefox and Safari.
Gave it a try; works better than expected. Has the custom filter tool (similar to element picker in main Origin), so I can block out the Linkedin Feed and other pestilence that Wipr couldn't tackle.
I switched to Brave about 2 months ago and never looked back. The speed difference is astonishing, just mind-blowing. I was always convinced that Safari was the fastest on macOS. And mind you that I did use an adblock with Safari as well (AdGuard for mac).
I tried the beta. UBOlite interfered with Safari’s native hide distracting items. The UI was unintuitive for setting features. Performance seemed slower than Ghostery. I’m sticking with Ghostery, which has none of those issues, until UBOlite matures.
Tangential: Anyone here using Magic Lasso? I can't stomach the idea of subscribing to an ad blocker for about 30 dollars each year and have wondered what it provides compared to others. I've been using Firefox Focus (it has an content blocker too), AdGuard and NextDNS (which is flaky because I don't want to have a profile and instead use the long abandoned app, whose toggle doesn't work many a times [tested by visiting test.nextdns.io]). For system wide tracker blocking, I use Lockdown Privacy (the free option).
ib.adnxs.com is AppNexus/Xandr's ad network domain. This popup likely appears when the extension detects the domain trying to access your data and is prompting you whether to block it, not requesting permission for itself.
Anyone know if there's a possibility this will be available in older versions of iOS? I'm very reluctant to update my iPhone. It's working well right now, and it seems just about impossible to roll back an update if it breaks something important.
I have been using the version published in Testflight for quite a while now and I must say I haven't seen much difference from my previous setup (Firefox Focus configured as the ad blocking provider in Safari settings)
But, given their record on providing excellent software and features, I am so happy to switch to them and to see what they are capable of in the future!
Content blockers on iOS are severely limited compared to what's possible with powerful extension mechanisms (Firefox, Chrome before Manifest V3) or built-in ad blockers (Brave). So there's not really differentiation on a technical level, which is where uBlock Origin was always strong. On these other platforms, there was a lot of innovation going on when I was in the space (2020), especially against sites that actively try to circumvent ad blockers. On iOS, there's not much that can be done. At least unless I missed some major developments.
As for the lists of resources to block and DOM elements to hide - which is by and large all an iOS ad blocker is - most just use the popular ones like EasyList with a few additions. uBlock Origin has a good track record of maintaining additional filters, so I think there's reason to believe it'll work better than most.
But all in all, for these two reasons, you probably won't notice much of a difference between different ad blockers on iOS.
I don't understand why Safari (and any browser) does not include ad blocking out of the box, ideally enabled by default but at least an option. Nobody like ads. Especially ads that take over a majority of your screen space and seem to fight efforts to close them (moving, slow response to tapping "X", etc.)
Ads are just a cancer on the web. If a site can only exist by ad revenue then it should not exist. Block them all.
Safari isn't Chromium (it's the opposite, Google forked WebKit and they've diverged). But that's not really your point.
There's a lot of reason to use Chrome: deep integration with Google (privacy issues aside, it's really useful), better add-on dev ecosystem which leads to better add-ons, WebKit was far ahead of Gecko for a while, I personally prefer the devtools in Chrome, developers tend to verify their website works more in Chrome so fewer bugs, iOS is webkit-only, etc.
Firefox is a great browser, especially now. But so is Chrome.
Ever since covid, I playfully ask people if they can guess why a lot of COVID non believers stocked up on toilet paper and food at the beginning of the lockdown.
Of course many say "they somehow thought it wouldn't be available later stupidly!" But I look past that one, and ask for possibly other reasons.
I have asked probably 100 people at this point.
Not a SINGLE person has said "in case they were wrong about the virus, and it was actually dangerous, they wouldn't want to leave their house to go get stuff"
That was the reason my family bought. And some of my anti COVID friends. And no one has guessed that. And they almost can't believe it or understand it.
And this is coming from people who took the virus seriously, but apparently didn't think ahead to not have to leave their house for basic dry goods?
I'll answer your question: 100% of web browser users do not care about which underlying engine the web browser is built on. And when they care about their web browser at all, they care about features and functionality.
Maybe I’m missing something, on latest macOS 15.6 it seems to be working but on my iPadOS 26 latest dev release it shows as installed but no settings. and it doesn’t ask for each website.
I haven't installed it but I might only because I can't disable Wipr 2 for some sites that I want/need. uBO Lite can do this. Other than that, I really like Wipr 2 and other apps by Kaylee.
Generally it works well, but what's particularly annoying is that it hides cookie walls, resulting in non-functional websites until I disable content blockers, close the dialog and re-enable them. Not sure if uBlock does any better, though.
Ghostery does the same, but has more fine-grained per-website controls. You can for example turn off just the consent-popup-blocker function for a website while keeping the anti-tracking ad-blocking functions.
Use Safari’s own built-in “Hide Distracting Items”. It’s also pretty good at hiding the few remaining “disable your ad blocker to continue” popups Wipr doesn’t yet catch.
Nice. Although there are content blockers for the iPhone, uBLock is the best. One of the worst aspects of iOS is that content blockers for it generally suck, and the web sucks without them.
A friendly reminder that uBlock Origin Lite can't protect you from modern ad tracking. Consider using Firefox with the original version on desktop and support the EU pushing Apple to allow alternative browser engines on iOS.
> Web Page Contents and Browsing History - Can read and alter sensitive information on web pages, including passwords, phone numbers and credit cards, and see your browsing history on the current tab's web page when you use the extension.
What does it mean for me to use the extension? Am I using it if it is installed?
There is no claim of "zero CPU". The claim is that the service worker wakes up only when necessary -- it is designed to be suspended by default from the ground up.
In Optimal and Complete modes, the content scripts will of course execute, without the service worker being unsuspended if no filtering occurs, but perform only the necessary work and bail out ASAP if not needed.
In Basic or "No filtering" modes, no content scripts are injected.
---
Edit: Sorry, I do say "uBOL itself does not consume CPU/memory resources while content blocking is ongoing". When I say "itself" I am referring to the service worker as seen in Chromium's Task Manager. The service worker isn't required for examples when navigating to `example.com` or here at `news.ycombinator.com`. All top content blockers I have looked at do require their service worker to execute, even for merely just switching between tabs. Some even use tricks to prevent their service worker to be suspended at all.
The warning message you mentioned simply means that the extension can inject "content scripts" into the web pages you visit. This feature is necessary, for example, to remove ads that cannot be blocked via HTTP.
People should be way more upset at the fact that Safari adblocking today is still inferior to even MV3 Google Chrome. Apple's implementation of declarativeNetRequest was semi-broken until the very latest iOS 18.6.
Apple can do the bare minimum, years after everyone else, and barely get called out. The Reality Distortion Field is the enemy.
Also funny that other devs had the gall to make people pay (sometimes subscriptions!) for Safari adblockers inferior to the free adblockers on any other browser.
The release notes mentioning this: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-not...
Not too many sources I could find other than https://matisyahu.blog/2025/07/31/and-it-is-raining-again/ - but apparently the bug was so bad that any adblocker attempting to use declarativeNetRequest could break all Cloudflare websites for the user.
In the wake of Google finally sounding the death knells of Manifest V2, it's good to see Apple's at least making progress towards... parity with Google's MV3 feature set? Not the privacy leadership that Apple's known for, but progress is progress.
No wonder I could never get past the cloudflare human check pages!
I agree with you regarding how Apple can do the bare minimum and barely get called out. But the fact is, I don't know of anything who's using declarativeNetRequest on Safari. The ecosystem of Safari blocking is centered around the legacy technology of content blockers from 2015. And the legacy technology works well enough that there's no pressure for either Apple or adblocker developers to adopt the new thing.
The legacy technology is also privacy-protecting in the sense that normal ad-blocking on iOS doesn’t use any third party JS filtering or reading of data on the page.
It breaks down because there are a ton of workarounds sites and ad-networks implement so it’s not super effective compared to MV2 ublock-origin
The privacy aspect is big. Even if content blocker extensions technically aren’t as capable, they were nice because they could be installed with impunity regardless of the party responsible for developing them. It’s a tradeoff.
In practice I’ve found them to be largely effective except for the most awful sites that I should probably be finding alernatives to instead of using (vote with your eyeballs), which is something I do even where “real” uBlock Origin is an option.
Yeah but we are comparing that against MV3 uBlock Origin Lite which is the subject of this article. They are the same in terms of privacy protection.
What’s the alternative? Using an Android phone with all of Google’s surveillance? A windows laptop with bad battery life, bloatware, and Microsoft’s increasingly bad dark pattern abuse? I feel like no matter what, consumers are screwed.
I have been extremely happy with GrapheneOS. The built-in browser includes ad blocking, although it is not as good as uBlock Origin.
Just run Firefox for Android. You can run a full copy of mv2 ublock origin
Graphene recommends Vanadium as Firefox "does not have internal sandboxing on Android".
How is the overall Graphene OS experience? Do you have any problems with banking or payment apps?
I have had no issues with any bank or brokerage apps, but NFC payments with Google Pay are blocked.
https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...
Banking and Credit Unions are a breeze for me. Grok is a no-go. Frustrating, given that's where all of xAI's new features go.
Way better than stock Android or iOS, which are basically spyware by design.
GrapheneOS. Linux. Gecko-based browsers.
> The Reality Distortion Field is the enemy.
Don't get me started on apple's "privacy is a right" marketing nonsense.
for all intents and purposes, it does not apply to your phone.
Can you firewall your phone? Can you figure out what is executing? Can you figure out what an app does or who it contacts?
Screw Chrome; both Safari and Chrome are inferior to Firefox' adblocking toolkit
And for the record Ublock Origin used to have a Safari extension. But that was forced to be phased out a couple of OS updates ago for reasons I can't remember.
In any case, as someone who will not touch Google's spyware browser with a ten-foot pole, it's nice to have a flagship alternative to Firefox that does decent adblocking.
I imagine Apple has 20 billion reasons annually why not to enhance adblocking.
Yeah that Google Search Deal is a 36% revenue share agreement for ad revenue stemming from being the default search engine, presumably that includes visiting a search result and then interacting with ads upon that page.
The solution is trivial. Don't make Apple applications, don't use Apple products. Build for open protocols. Otherwise, go through life as if Apple didn't exist.
Walled gardens are an abomination.
Apple's software is generally low quality with more bugs and less features than equivalent linux/oss software. There is a long list of 5, 10 - year old, well-known bugs that apple simply ignores. They know their userbase is built off of marketing and 'design', not product quality.
> Also funny that other devs had the gall to make people pay (sometimes subscriptions!) for Safari adblockers inferior to the free adblockers on any other browser.
That's absolutely perfect, and fits into the typical apple fangirl pattern that can be readily seen on hackernews - pseudo-technical people promoting some closed cute-looking macos app that's just objectively worse existing OSS alternatives.
I find it analogous to when financially successful people in their mid-life crisis stage decide to buy a 'nice' car, while not having any interest in cars previously. They invariably seem to end up with the the most flashy/marketed car, even though that car is objectively worse than another car for half the price. They will extol the car's virtue in a way that sounds like they are literally reading off of a marketing brochure, and actual car people just laugh at them.
So I tapped the link on my iPhone and was taken to the App Store.
The download button is available. Great! Finally I can block ads in mobile too.
It installs, opening it is a simple message saying I need to enable it in Safari settings. Strange, but ok.
I go to Settings -> Safari -> Extensions -> uBlock Origin Lite.
> “uBO Lite” is not available for this version of Safari.
This feels like a series of failures, why is it available for download on iPhone if it doesn’t work at all? Is iOS Safari really that different to Mac Safari?
> It installs, opening it is a simple message saying I need to enable it in Safari settings. Strange, but ok.
I’ve made several Safari extensions for iOS, and they all have to do this.
Apple provides no API for an app to enable its own Safari extension. It also has no public API on iOS to deeplink to the Settings page for enabling the extension. You just have to tell users where to go and hope they don’t get lost.
(There is an API on macOS to quickly open Safari extension settings. It’s nice! Maybe they’ll add it to iOS someday.)
Does an app for that even need to exist? Why can’t extensions be a standalone thing in the store?
> Why can’t extensions be a standalone thing in the store?
1) Because then you need a whole parallel set of processes for configuring, updating, and uninstalling those things, distinct from the existing processes for apps. And you need to make that process accessible to users who may be used to everything being an app.
2) A nontrivial number of browser extensions on iOS are part of standalone apps anyway, like password managers or bookmarking tools. It'd be very strange to have both app-with-browser-extensions and browser-only-extensions, or to require some extensions to be installed and updated in tandem with a companion app for expected functionality.
Because Apple's distribution model centers around everything being bundled as an app
It seems to require iOS 18.6, it’s working for me after updating.
Can confirm. Installed uBlock onto an 18.5 device, got the 'not supported' message. Upgraded to 18.6 and now it works.
Thank you, this should be at the top.
I didn’t know there was a 18.6. I usually get notification.
Update notifications seem to be delayed in iOS. Batches of devices get them at different times for A/B testing and reduce bandwidth requirements.
This is based on my personal observation of different devices. I could be wrong.
And note that all of HN is updating it is taking forever.
Which apparently my iPhone SE doesn’t qualify for.
Every time this happens, I tell myself, “maybe it’s time to try and android phone”
You'been answered already about the support periods in Android, but let me add more for you (and others mentioning support times of the system): in Android this problem doesn't exist to begin with. The fact that getting a new web browser version is anchored to getting a whole new operating system version, is preposterous and absurd, pure planned obsolescence from Apple. You would just upgrade your Chrome, Brave, Firefox, or whatever browser app, and do with them what your were trying to do. (in this case install a browser extension, for which the best one qould be Firefox).
This situation with iOS sounds as ridiculous as if it was mandatory to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 in order to update the Edge browser. (Edited to remove useless rant)
9 year old phone? Don't worry, google won't care about you either.
at least they don't prevent firefox from supporting a 11 years old version.
The 3rd generation iPhone SE was released in 2022.
Both iPhone SE (3rd generation) [2022] and iPhone SE (2nd generation) [2020] support iOS 18.6.
So that commenter must not have those generations and your comment doesn't help.
iPhone SE (1st generation) [2016] is stuck on iOS 15 but still receiving security updates, like 15.8.4 from the spring.
the 2022 iPhone SE supports iOS 18
I gotta say, using full fat uBlock Origin in Firefox on my android is pretty great.
I don't know which version of the iPhone SE you have, there have been several over time. Mine is from 2016 (had to look that up). No update to iOS 18, true.
In your specific case you have to look very carefully in the Android world to avoid an even worse situation. I think there are a few Android models now that promise several years of updates, remains to be seen, though. If this is your beef with Apple, then I doubt you will feel much better with Android.
iPhone SE 1st edition?
2nd edition here, and I updated to 18.6 days ago.
Apple has way better backwards compatibility than Android. Your 9 year old iPhone SE is still getting security updates.
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I've used Firefox Focus as an ad blocker for Safari on iOS for several years now. I don't actually use it as my browser, I just use Safari as normal, but it integrates with Safari, and seems to work well enough.
Wipr 2. One time payment for macOS and mobile. And it even blocks ads on YouTube (when watched via Safari).
One time until Wipr 3, coming from a Wipr 1/2 user, just to be clear.
From what I can find, the original Wipr was released for iOS in Sep 2015 and the macOS version followed in Aug 2018.
Wipr 2 is a complete rewrite and was released in Nov 2024. So, in theory, for £1.99 you could've gotten 9 years of ad-blocking on iOS and for another £1.99 the same on macOS for 6 years.
And since this requires maintenance of the blocklists and associated code, I am totally fine with paying a small amount once every few years. And I'm not even forced to pay as the older versions usually continue to run - albeit on life support.
yea...I in theory would be excited about ublock coming to safari but Wipr is working so well I'm kind of reluctant to change...I do want to support gorhill working on MacOS though...
Good! Wipr was very cheap, so was Wipr 2, if paying a tiny fee every few years for a well-made app that does its job well keeps the developer in business and able to keep maintaining it, then I'm happy to do it.
That said, I'm not actually convinced there will be a Wipr 3, at least not without some significant change to the ecosystem first. Wipr 2 was a complete rewrite of Wipr, there's no reason to expect it will need yet another complete rewrite.
Why would you need to upgrade to wipr 3 if wipr 2 does what you want and need?
Ad blocking is an arms race and your ad blocker needs continuous updates to continue working on large sites.
Adblockers don’t just keep working forever.
Seconded. It’s so very great! I finally switched off 1Blocker to use it.
Try Brave browser on iOS, it cuts everything irrelevant without third-party apps, and you also get background media playback on locked screen (settings toggle) on youtube as "one more thing".
Firefox Focus has this feature too! (ie: play YouTube videos from lock screen controls, keeps playing with screen off)
Brave is awesome. Skip the silly crypto integration and enjoy the amazing integrated ad-blocking.
Extensions for Safari on iOS and iPadOS have been available since 2021, I’ve been using ad blockers on those systems, but it’s nice the have uBlock now.
This is a bit misleading. Safari content blockers have been available on iOS since 2015. In 2021, JavaScript-based Safari web extensions were added.
Trying to actually write one before, it's incredibly frustrating experience, as you still need to have some weird native glue code in in Swift/Obj-C. And everything is under-documented, as it the true Apple Experience. (I forgot the details. I can find the code on github, maybe.)
If you ask yourself why there are so little Safari extensions, this is why.
edit: I look at the code now... I needed to wrestle with BOTH cocoapods and npm, at which point I gave up
[EDIT to clarify: here I’m talking about writing a javascript based extension, not a content blocker]
That’s not my experience (in the admittedly only browser extension I’ve ever written).
After getting it working to my satisfaction in Chrome and Firefox, I created the Safari macOS/iOS versions by running
in my repo. Then I opened xcode, configured the signing/capabilities, and built it. IIRC I had to create the directory for the output because xcode didn't do it itself, but once that was done I could install it to both macOS and iOS. Honestly I was surprised it was so little effort. I don’t doubt that an extension with more functionality than mine might require a jumping through a lot more hoops, but it definitely can be easy to successfully target Safari IME.Interesting. Maybe I tried to do something too complex, I don't remember.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/cre...
Here they talk about the "container" that needs to be in Swift/Obj-C. I remember I used to have some problems with the "container" application
I think the issue starts to be when you want your extension/app to have any kind of settings that is retained? I don't remember, really.
Yeah, I didn’t go the “Creating a Safari web extension” route, rather I went via “Packaging a web extension for Safari”: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/pac...
I note that they say the command has changed from the one I used, it’s now:
My extension has storage/settings, and it works fine. I have edited no Swift code at all.Even better, thanks for the correction.
Update your iphone and it will work
This doesn't work for phones that are limited to earlier iOS versions. Content blocking was available to developers all the way back to iOS 9. Why would these guys deliberately limit their software to only the latest versions?
The oldest supported iPhone is nearly 7 years old. Can you point to another officially supported phone that’s older?
There was a bug in Safari's registerContentScripts that was only just recently fixed in 18.6. uBOL needs that bugfix.
There was also bugs in the declarative net request implementation that was also just recently fixed - quite a few bugs have been holding uBlock back. The reason why uBlock hadn't come sooner was because DNR hadn't been implemented which would have required the developer to go out of their way to specifically re-write uBlock Origin to work with Apple's content blocking API but now Apple has implemented DNR it should open up the possibility for more choice in the content blocking extensions market.
The whole point of going iPhone is not to have to deal with these kinds of situations.
So you never got gatekept by Apple from accessing a feature unless you had a specific version of the OS? Heck, even macbooks get killed every year by not allowing them to build for newer iOS versions.
The whole point of Apple, one could say, IS to make sure to forcibly make you update to access a new feature. That way either you can update or you've got to buy a brand-new device.
I'm curious what you believe the alternative is - "new features magically appear in released versions of an operating system without the software being updated"?
Seems to work fine on Linux unless you stick to kernels that are multiple decades old.
Whether it's technical or social the situation on iOS is clearly inferior.
You're being disingenuous. There is more to an operating system than a kernel; new features in Linux software frequently require supporting software or libraries to be updated.
The whole point of using an iPhone is that you don't have to update it?
No, the App Store allowing you to download an app with an extension target that doesn’t match the current system. At the very least there should be a warning or a button to update iOS if that’s possible on the current device.
Surely a packaging mistake.
Choice and platform fragmentation in one neat bundle. I am almost surprised that Apple doesn't just force updates on everyone when it is possible just to maintain that additional bit of uniformity and conformity for its "think different" crowd.
Bad news: these kinds of situations are inevitable. You've abdicated control of your digital life for a comforting lie
>The whole point of going iPhone is not to have to deal with these kinds of situations.
This is actually really funny because Android users have had the ability to use any browser they want for like a decade+, including browsers with adblock built in, and browsers with fully featured extension systems supporting all major desktop ad blockers, and it all just works. One click download, no setup, nothing.
This is one of those places where Apple has intentionally made a terrible UX for you to steer you into their walled garden / first party products. You have to use Safari, you have to dig around in settings, you have to make sure your versions all line up, it's pointless rigamarole that will mean the majority of users stick with stock Safari, just as intended.
In many ways, things "just work" on any platform Apple product managers aren't allowed to muck with...
>> “uBO Lite” is not available for this version of Safari.
> This feels like a series of failures
Your "device" is too old, because you failed to pay Apple recently enough.
Finally you can block ads on mobile? I've been using AdGuard for iOS Safari for ten years or so.
And I've been using Wipr and 1Blocker since iPhone SE-1 with Safari...
Non-Chinese version: https://apps.apple.com/app/ublock-origin-lite/id6745342698
I got the Australian one by replacing `cn` with `au` in the link.
https://apps.apple.com/au/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...
You can share it simply as https://apps.apple.com/app/id6745342698, no region required
Thank you for the link. Can some moderator please update the link? Thanks in advance.
Update the link to what?
I meant to the one in the reply, but it looks like someone already did.
Updated, thanks!
I just searched within the (edit: iOS App Store) App Store app for
For the unquoted search, there are twelve different apps/items returned above it - you really have to scroll down to find it at number 13.Even for the quoted search, it’s returned in fourth place.
More interestingly the second time I searched with quoted it’s in third place, and the third time of searching the sponsored items at the top is getting even more random.
It is mind-boggling, how in this day and age search functions can still be soooo bad in so many places on the web and inside applications. At the very least a 100% substring match should be very visible in the result. If not at the top, then there should be sorting criteria, to make it appear at the top, so that one can sane-ify the search result, when it is not sane.
A good example for bad search is the windows start menu. If you just logged in and the system is still loading (whatever it is doing all that long...) and you press the super key and then start typing, it might be too slow to find things _locally on your disk_, and might start searching online. When you have developed an automatism and just continue typing and then hit enter/return key, you will get some online shit result shown in Edge or some Microsoft store shit, instead of simply launching your already installed app. A critical race right there in the start menu. It's baffling.
Recently, there was a reddit post about a KDE menu search thing just as silly. It would not prioritize the title/name of an app, but instead, after typing 3 or more characters, find a word in the description of a launcher/starter of other apps and show those first, even though the 3 chars or more are a perfect substring of the name of an app.
People reinvent simple search and make silly searches over and over again. One of the main criteria is, that a substring match must lead to being high in the results, if not the top result. Shorter wins vs longer, because the match has higher percentage of match with the full title/name. Beginning of the string matched? Higher in results. All very basic things, that shouldn't be difficult to implement.
It helps to realize that the search is less of a tool for you to find information and more of a tool to show you an ad targeted on your search query. That's why ads are the top results and the organic data you wanted is after the fold. You're asking an ad company for information, and you don't expect an ad as a result? They are only continuing to show the organic results to tease you into coming back..
The original comment was about Apple's App Store. I assume there are financial ways to get your App "featured" there or something like that but as far as I know, you can't financially take direct influence on whatever logic Apple uses to sort search results there. Yet, it can still be spectacularly difficult to find an App - even if you type in its exact name, as indicated by OP (can confirm from my experience).
If you have a theory about what Apple's motivation to actively serve such bad results could be, I'd be interested to hear it. I've always sort of assumed that the root cause for this is some combination of neglect on Apple's part and attempts at gaming the system by developers (I don't know much about developing for the App Store, but I presume there are forms of SEO-like activities that can be done in attempts to bump up your app).
Most ad sales platforms have auctions for ad slots and/or keywords. If you want to game the system and have money to burn as growth hacking, you can place a larger value in those auctions/keywords to win a chance at your ad being placed in front of more eyeballs. When it comes to apps/games especially, people will chose whatever is posted from laziness, fomo, or just tired of looking and picking the easy route. I suspect that when you get an unrelated ad to your search, it's because someone else was willing to spend more money for those search terms than someone with more relevant matches. It's always going to be about those Benjamins.
I get that it's always be about money in the end but I understand this sub-thread to be a bit more specific: Is there an ad sales platform run by Apple where your Benjamins have influence on the search ranking in the App Store? I and many other people here are not talking about things that are clearly ads (like a "featured" result or the ads shown by google and other search engines).
The App Store is an ad platform [1]. App developers are bidding on those search keywords.
[1] https://ads.apple.com/app-store/best-practices/keywords
Is Apple really an ad company?
I think it's reasonable to expect better from them.
Since Apple take a slice of the App store sale it's in their best interest to "feature" apps which are already popular and bring in good revenue.
Why promote an app with 100 sales over another with 10,000?
Why do people continue asking this question? Why do people think Apple is not collecting data to serve ads? Do they not remember being asked about it when setting up their devices when the ask if you want to share or not? Have they not seen the privacy options about Apple's ad network? Is it actual ignorance or head in the sand?
They aim to become one:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34299433
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/11/19/apple-now-directly-sell...
https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/04/10/apple-makes-it-re...
The search in Google Messages on Android is completely useless too. It seems like it only searches within the past few days or something, if I try searching for something from a while back it never finds it. And they removed the feature to quickly scroll back to a date in the past, so the only way to dig up old texts is to manually scroll back in a conversation and hope you find it. It's absolutely ridiculous that the search is so bad when it's an app by Google of all companies.
That's funny because iMessage search works quite well if you can find it buried in the interface. I have a feeling Apple themselves forgot it exists and hasn't gotten around to 'modernizing' it with AI yet.
Even funnier is, it was obscenely bad for years, and then it made a sudden jump to “pretty darn good”. My headcanon is that someone high-up at Apple tried to search for a message, noticed how broken it was, and then assigned an entire engineering department to work on nothing else than iMessage search for two weeks.
This Reddit post suggests this happened in iOS 13 (so 2019): https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/d7wemx/underrated_ne...
Now it feels like a cheatcode, at least when it comes to verbatim searches (probably because the entire message database is now indexed, if I had to guess).
Seriously, try searching for the letter “e” and click “View All”. You will get effectively every message you’ve ever sent or received, in a single, reasonably scrollable list. For me it dates back to 2018.
I personally sent several scathing emails directly to directors about the issue. I have a long iMessage history and there was a point that just entering a single character in the search field would lock up my mac, let alone my older iPhone.
I have noticed and appreciate the change, so my headcanon is that they actually do read feedback. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> iMessage search works quite well if you can find it buried in the interface
And as long as you only want to search all messages, not a single conversation.
Let me give an example: I know a person sent me an image in imessage about one year ago. How do I search "from:user has:attachment date:2024-07-*"?
In gmail that's easy, in discord, that's easy. Does imessage search have literally any of those filters?
Searching within one chat seems especially like it's table-stakes for any chat app's search
If you type the name of the person, it should allow you to create a filter for "Messages with: Person". It should also pop up a filter bubble for photos. From there I think you can type in some query and it should do a query on the photos via text. I don't think you can add your date filter though.
Second way would be to open that conversation view, click on the contact icon at the top of the view, which should then bring you to a details page that lists a bunch of metadata and settings about the conversation (e.g. participants, hide alerts, ...). One of the sections shows all photos from that conversation. Browse that until you find the one you care about.
> I have a feeling Apple themselves forgot it exists and hasn't gotten around to 'modernizing' it with AI yet.
tfw you're a big tech engineer/PM who does the right thing for your users but get blamed anyway
> The search in Google Messages on Android is completely useless too.
It's literally all Google products. They've just simplified and contextualized and added other things over the years such that if you're not searching for something already above the fold then it won't show up.
When I was using Gmail I had an email with important information that I needed about once a year. I knew the exact subject and who it was from but it would never show up in search. It was my only starred email so I could find it on demand.
Part of the reason I pay for Shortwave is because its basic search is so much better than Gmail's. I don't even use the LLM except for more descriptive searches, which it is also quite good at.
Thunderbird search is one of the best I've ever seen. Very granular options. Highly recommend.
I've managed to divest myself of most Google Apps. At this point I'm only using them for shared docs or calendars.
It’s not mind boggling at all. It’s controlled by one entity that is not optimizing for good search, but rather its own financial gain.
What's the entity in question for KDE search?
KDE search is super good, if you're referring to krunner. It searches everything, bookmarks, open tabs, filenames, paths, and even file contents. And it's really fast.
You have to turn the file indexer on or install it if you don't have it. Try `baloo status` or `baloo6 status`. Poke around in setting too so you can index what you need and not temp files.
KDE search doesn't ignore your search terms like many search engines.
But it also doesn't let you choose which version of emacs is the first result for "emacs" so it has a separate set of problems.
The search is pulling from a bunch of sources in a particular order and returning results as it finds them probably. I wouldn't expect it to be anything sinister.
Indeed, it's called Plasma Search, available in system settings. Providers can be enabled, disabled, and configured at will. I can't imagine it would be all that difficult to code your own and get it hooked up in there, if you were so inclined. Personally I just unchecked everything except "Applications" and I use it like a quick launcher. Works great for my purposes.
I use it exactly like that too. It's too jarring to get anything else in the results for me and while I can't imagine why anyone would include any other source, to each their own.
This should disable the start menu web search on Windows 11. It's one of the first .reg tweaks I apply to a new system:
>It is mind-boggling, how in this day and age search functions can still be soooo bad in so many places on the web and inside applications
Not really, if you understand how modern search algorithms work.
Pagerank[1] relies on link analysis -- you see who links to whom, and combine that with information on the traffic each site gets to suss out which sites are more likely to be sought out.
None of that data is available when you're searching through your local hard drive -- you have to use basic search operators like AND, OR, or use negation (Eg: "Star Wars -film" to find information on the space laser thing)
Unfortunately, we don't train folks on how to search anymore, so when "the algorithm" doesn't produce what they are looking for, folks have no ability to conduct their own search.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
Ok, this is too good. When I clicked on the App Store link, it opened the App Store and a "What's New" dialog popped up and the only thing highlighted was "Improved Search".
https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/
It's sad there needs to be a third-party app for local Windows search, but it works . . .
I watched an elderly mathematics professor manually type a full URL into the windows search box, complete with "https", and I thought to myself "surely that won't work" and lo and behold...
You mean he searched for a URL and received something that was an exact match as his sole result? Sounds like the search worked perfectly.
What do you think should've happened? The search say "I know what you're searching for, but I refuse to help because your dumb ass should've typed this into a web browser address bar?"
This isn't 1995. Computers have access to the Internet, and there's no reason your computer's search bar should only search local.
Now, if he'd had a file with that as its name, and a text document with that URL, I would've expected those first. Maybe not at first. Depends on disk space allocated to indexing.
I didn’t mean to elicit hostilities, my comment is in the context of the parent comment where they are discussing displeasure with the web search results coming from the Windows search bar. As a more technically literate user, I would prefer for no web results except from my web browser, but I was sharing a corollary to that.
Not to stick up for the search in the app store, but I don't think it is necessarily that straightforward, particularly where there is money to be made by gaming the ranking.
if there's a system; people will go out of their way to game it if there's potentially $$$ involved.
See: companies naming themselves "Aardvark (plumbing, electrician, locksmith, moving) in the day of phone books.
That's what you get for letting megacorps get away with monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior.
cool story bruh
Tangent; put lists in alphabetical order! Or some other order which makes sense to the user in the context, like date, or priority. Something which is not unordered, coincidence, whatever the hashtable or nosql DB produced, order of creation when that isn't an important ordering in the domain, some internal or even visible GUID.
Worse if there's no filter, worse if it's a dropdown and there's no way to type the desired name, only look.
It's like Youtube adding a section of videos you've already watched and have nothing to do with your search, in search results.
Seriously, especially when the substring is in the title or filename. Google drive searching is infuriating for that. It will pull up barely related documents to my search term that has the word buried in the content, and not even show the file that has my search term verbatim in the filename or title. If there's one company I expect a really great search experience with, it's Google, and yet it's been this way for years and years...
In Apple's case we can safely assume it's intentionally like that to make the most money.
Its great for the app store if people mistakenly download the wrong app. They can increase the total downloads stats for more than one app that way. And it creates more "engagement' with the app store. They don't care that it's "forced" engagement
Does Apple still allow shamefully antipattern subscriptions like $7/week?
They are so complicit in garbage rebill apps, it's pathetic.
RoboKiller recently went from like $9.99/mo to $7/week.
Why would anyone even add anything called Robokiller ?
What is it supposed to do?
I never pay for anything recurring. Most are scams anyway.
It’s not mind boggling, it’s on purpose
>It is mind-boggling, how in this day and age search functions can still be soooo bad in so many places on the web and inside applications.
You mean to say that you think they just somehow forgot to optimize these fundamental things to work well? No.... If the search functionality provided by an otherwise highly capable, ultra-rich tech company is an utter piece of shit, it's intentional. The optimization is elsewhere, while the users are left stuck with a deformed excuse.
Anyone downvoting feel like instead explaining their reasoning? Or just how search can be such utter shit in certain contexts, despite often being developed by companies like Microsoft, Apple, and even fucking Google of all things?
People sure love to embody the "leave the multi-billion dollar corporation alone" meme.
I just searched for uBlock. Top result is an ad for another ad blocker. Second result is an ad blocker called "Ublock", with "Origin" in its tags; a clear scam whose purpose is to leech off the reputation of uBlock Origin and trick people.
Apple's App Store is chock full of scams like this. It's not just bad search, it's a failure to enforce any kind of anti scam policy (combined with seemingly intentionally terrible search).
But god forbid you have the word Android somewhere in your app, because they will then reject your update.
> god forbid you have the word Android somewhere in your app
I literally have an app installed on my iPhone called “Android TV” (a remote to control android smart TVs, which I used to have years ago), and it says “Connect to Android TV” in giant header typeface on the app homescreen.
Searching for “Android” on app store brings up even more apps containing that word in the name and in the app, including third-party non-Google apps.
We have an app for our platform and that app has a news section, we were rejected because we had news about Android devices. We are at this point providing a filtered news list where items with certain keywords are excluded on Apple devices. Maybe it's because of the app category.
Apple’s App Store makes so much revenue (mainly through the slightly more legit scams like gacha games, but plenty through weekly subscriptions for outright scam apps too) that there are many incentives for that team to never clean this up.
It’s a huge driver of what Apple pushes as the future of the company: services. It has been this way for more than a decade now: "What the hell is this????Remember our talking about finding bad apps with low ratings? Remember our talk bout becoming the 'Nordstroms' of stores in quality of service?“ - Phil Schiller in 2012 (https://www.imore.com/hilarious-phil-schiller-email-reveals-...)
The problem is that people like us use Homebrew (and tell our families to), so there’s little incentive to complain loudly about this issue. Browser extensions and the occasional one-off app are the only reasons to go there.
Why do people think a browser extension is safe to use?
Why do people think a browser is safe to use? Why do people think any app is safe to use? Why do people think a website is safe to use? Why do people think an OS is safe to use? Why do people think a driver is safe to use? Why do people think a firmware is safe to use? Why do people think a hardware device is safe to use? Why do people think the chips inside are safe to use? Why do people think an ISP is safe to use?
If you have a point to make about it being particularly unsafe or different from any other internet/software trust, make that point. Otherwise you know well enough that there isn't any other option but trust, and people generally trust stuff until given a good reason not to.
The point is that Safari's extension system requires using the App Store, not that it's inherently safer. In some ways, the "App" model that Safari uses could be more unsafe, regardless of Apple's code review.
Nonetheless, a critical engagement of software "safety" would require another few thousand words, at least.
Security experts.
Apple’s contempt for its customers is palpable these days.
It breaks my heart to see how far they’ve fallen.
I have not raised expectations since they deleted half of my music collection years ago. To this day they provide no way to export iMessage threads.
Some of us have been palpating it for decades.
I've always wondered why attorneys do not see these situations as easy money. Corporations really do control the courts...
Apple is really bad at search, and on purpose. Welp, money before quality!
Nah I think they’re just bad at search, macOS Spotlight search has to be the most slow janky search I have ever used.
Which I find really sad because at one point OSX had search quality that was really satisfying. That was maybe twenty years ago for me.
Yes. Spotlight search for the Application launcher use-case was close to the speed and quality of LaunchBar (which still works that way of course) when Apple first introduced the command-space shortcut, on vastly slower “oughts” computers. Today it’s much slower and less consistent.
However we know that they could easily do a simple search effectively because Apple’s Launchpad has a perfect app search built in. If you give Launchpad a global shortcut you can press <shortcut>saf<return> and be assured it will instantly open safari every time. Of course, LaunchBar (no affiliation, but I’ve been using it for 22 years) still beats that in every way.
My favourite was back in os7. I didn't really use the file system because you just started typing the name of the file and it came up instantly. I'm not sure why companies have to break simple stuff that works well.
Spotlight was a revelation in Tiger. I don’t know exactly when it degraded but it’s a damn shame how annoying it’s become.
MacOS to me started to regress ~2012. I can’t remember what specific release it was, but one major MacOS release around then no longer remembered my MacBook’s external monitor layouts between work and home anymore and it was always “random”.
Spotlight, AirTunes/Airplay, iTunes, etc all also just slowly degraded. It’s like Steve Jobs was personally doing all QA and it just stopped when he died. I remember iTunes genius being SO GOOD that it cost me a fortune in song purchases, but now that apple just gets my monthly music payment, discovering new music is hard again.
Mojave was a high watermark. 32 bit support still. Relatively polished.
You haven’t used windows search recently I take it.
Eh, as a person then uses both occasionally... I feel like they're pretty on-par?
Is the osx search performing so much better on your end? If so, in results or speed? Because for me, both osx and windows searches leave me annoyed anytime I try to use them, it's so bad that I usually prefer to use CLI tools on both platforms ...
Or were you just saying it cuz it's funny?
On the azure win11 desktop I am using professionally (only windows I use) a large fraction of the time you can't even search anything because the windows menu just freeze.
Same for me, But OSX seems to have a similar issue at least on my MacBook Pro M1.
I occasionally get the multicolor disk spinner which locks all UI interactions for a few seconds (10-30s) until it unfreezes and works as before again...
Haven't been able to figure out the exact cause for it, feels very random.
I think it got slow on M1 when AI features came out. I recently disabled them in and trying that out.
Don’t do that! You’ll be left behind by society— rendered penniless and fatally inconvenienced by the lack of tooling to exponentially improve your productivity!
I know that occasionally, the Spotlight index can get corrupted, and you have to manually delete it and let it regenerate. If you search for that with your current OS version, you should be able to find some decent instructions for it.
(My guess is that the Windows issue is something similar? but I have no experience with it, so don't know if it can be fixed in a similar way)
While it’s clearly not everybody, in my and a number of other users’ personal onedrives, search hasn’t worked since May. Zero results for any search in any context. No response from MS other than essentially “yep! Sorry! Working on it! Promise! In the interim, try just remembering where everything is maybe! lol!”
[dead]
I’m sure there’s some indexing thing I could take care of, but windows edges out spotlight for me for both ineffectiveness and slowness on every machine I use. For me, windows used to be far better than spotlight. It’s strange to me how much better the command line tools do essentially the same job, and that, anecdotally, the GUI ones seem to be getting worse?
They definitely are bad at search. When I type “safar” into iOS settings, it says “no results for “safar”” while it looks for the fucking built-in browser’s search page.
Weird. I get lots of relevant results with Safari at the top. Which somehow makes it a little worse: I’d naively think we should get identical results.
I can never find my emails on Mac. Even worse if they're organized in folders. I just want a universal search: contains text, sort by age, I don't care about other filters....
This doesn't really make Apple look better, but a huge part of it is surely how recent the Ublock Origin app for iOS is. New apps take time to propagate and become good responses. Which makes sense, you wouldn't want someone else to be able to instantly cover Ublock Origin itself with a copycat app (not that it doesn't happen anyway).
Seems like the copycat issue happens regardless: https://blog.lastpass.com/posts/warning-fraudulent-app-imper...
Search is bad everywhere these days.
Honestly, even Google search with "terms reddit" is better than Reddit's own built-in search. That says a lot.
Same deal on may mac. Unless I know the exact file name, Finder search is useless. Spotlight will happily surface a PDF from 2017 before showing the text file you saved yesterday.
Which brings me to the question: why is search so hard?
I tried on the mac store.
For the unquoted search, it now comes in 7th for me.
If I just search for ublock, I don't see it at all.
The mac store has long been bad, but this seems worse.
Why use an app store. Is Apple more trustworthy than the author of this app. Think about it
The company continues to increase its advertising services revenue. In terms of protecting computer buyers from advertising and associated surveillance, one could reason that its interests are conflicted
App store "search" has always been a joke. It has never been suitable for app "discovery". The company would rather computer owners select from lists of recommended apps
I needed to add search to my own website. I wanted it to be local search (the titles for the documents are all available locally). I tried several different popular 1000s of stars JavaScript search libraries. All but one failed on simple searches. Like if the title was "See Spot Run to the Park" and my search was "Park" or "Run" this title would not be listed as a result and titles with neither word would appear. I reported the issues, they were ignored as "working as intended". Not sure why anyone uses these libraries. I suspect they don't actually test. The plug them in, it appears to work at a glance, and they ship it.
I'm talking about Fuse.js, FlexSearch.js, etc.... I don't remember which other ones I tried but was shocked out bad the results were
Have you tried Pagefind?
https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind
https://pagefind.app/
no. At a glance it appears to be create an index at site build time. That's not what I needed. I needed to search user document titles (different for every user). Those document titles are synced to local storage. So not a build time thing
I don’t even see uBO Lite in the iOS App Store. I scrolled pretty far, too.
I get shown a fucking ad for Google Chrome when searching for “ublock origin lite” in the iOS app store.
Same. It never used to show them. It only started recently. But it's only partially letting some ads through. Youtube video ads are still blocked which is good.
Working fine for me-- when I search under Mac Apps for "ublock origin lite" (no quotes), it appears in 1st place.
For me, searching for "uBlock origin lite" (without the quotes) puts it in 3rd place; below AdBlock Pro and an ad for trip(dot)com.
When I search "uBlock origin" it doesn't seem to show up at all.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I too get the same for Mac apps, but for iOS apps still see the same competitor results returned first. For me, that's the same whether I use the App Store from my phone, or laptop.
Does anyone have the canonical link and care to share?
App Store search takes a while to surface exact-name searches for newly released apps. No idea why.
Apple is generally bad at search. For further evidence, see their developer website. To get anything useful out of it, I have to use a custom Google search: https://www.google.com/search?num=100&udm=14&q=site%3Adevelo...
Some commenters are presenting a conspiracy theory about how Apple is intentionally sabotaging App Store search, perhaps with the goal of maximizing App Store search ad revenue. I think the empirical evidence, covering all examples of Apple search, points to incompetence rather than malice. Money does factor in, but again, not in a conspiratorial way: rather, Apple simply has no monetary incentive to fix their own incompetence. It's complacency rather than conspiracy. This is what happens with monopolies and duopolies: they've already got essentially a captive audience, so they no longer need to put in the effort to compete. They just "phone it in", so to speak.
I don't think that Apple wants a bunch of scams in the App Store. But when developers and users are practically throwing money at Apple, no matter what Apple does or doesn't do, and "services" margins are 70%, there's a great temptation to pocket the profits and shrug.
For another example of how Apple is bad at search, look at the Settings app. Awful. But again, it's not sabotage. That would be silly and pointless. It's just pure and simple incompetence and complacency.
I agree fully about how they have proven their incompetence, but let’s imagine you are a PM there and you pitch a feature “Fixing App Store search using well-known strategies and techniques”
I can’t imagine that especially Tim Cook’s Apple is naive enough to not realize that’s going to dent ad revenue, since most developers have to buy ads directly because of the current flaws. So it seems like that project won’t be approved because your boss and their boss are going to know that you’ll be losing Apple a ton of sweet, sweet pure-profit revenue if you succeed. If it would make Apple 100 million dollars in profits to fix it, especially for a neatly encapsulated problem like App Store, where it wouldn’t be that disruptive to just rip and replace the search engine, Apple would just fix it.
All the Mac and iPhone search incompetence, it’d be revenue neutral to fix, and not lend itself to flashy advertising like “liquid glass” does, so that’s why that’ll never happen.
> most developers have to buy ads directly because of the current flaws.
I wouldn't say it's because of the flaws. It's because of the design: regardless of how well search works, the top hit is always an ad. At best, even with search working perfectly, a search for your own app would return your app as the #2 hit at highest. The search ad system still incentivizes developers to buy ads for searches of their own app, if only as a defensive measure to prevent other developers from inserting their apps at the #1 spot. And Apple makes money, and you pay money, if App Store users click on your own ad for your own app at the #1 spot rather than the "free" search result at the #2 spot.
Oh yeah, and you can't block App Store search ads with an ad blocker. Consider how the App Store is entirely native and has no web-based purchases or downloads.
I hear you, and agree that is true. But consider this angle:
Without buying an ad, but with a competent organic search:
Customer searches "Ublock origin". Results: (This is actually a real life test)
1. (Ad) Adblock Pro for Safari
Note: The rest are actual organic "results"!
2. Brave Browser & Search Engine (WTF?)
3. Ublock: Ad Blocker, Speed Test
4. Firefox Focus: Privacy Browser
5: Same as #1 but organic
6: AdGuard
I gave up trying to find actual Ublock Origin Lite in these results, but I did install it on my phone earlier so it must be in there somewhere.
A working search would have Ublock Origin Lite as #2 after the ad. If I'm Ublock Origin Lite, I might be satisfied with this and trust that anyone who isn't too easily distracted should be able to find me right there above the fold. So I'd be less likely to buy an ad than I am in our real world. #2 isn't as good as #1, but it's good enough for a lot of people. Combine this with not allowing people to infringe trademarks in their keywords or whatever shenanigans is going on above, and the App Store would be a lot less of a scamware cesspool. And boy, do scams pay well!
Apple Podcast search never fails to enrage me. There's no way to search within a specific show, just all your followed shows at once. Even if you know the exact episode title, if it has common words in it, you'll get a stream of garbage. It treats any match in the episode description with the same weight as an exact match of the episode title. So I have to go on the web, search the specific podcast to figure out the date, then just scroll to it in Apple Podcasts.
With just
ublock origin lite
I get it in position 1 one (after one unrelated ad).
doesn't seem to be available in the Dutch app-store.
If anybody is interested, the original (not lite) firefox-version of uBlock Origin works just well in Orion (webkit based browser by kagi) in both iPhone and Mac. It is great to have it for safari though anyway as safari is the default browser in these platforms.
I love, LOVE Orion. Use it both on iPhone and Mac. However, lately, it's becoming more and more buggy and sluggish. Writing this in Orion though - just have to quit it a few times a day to battle the RAM consumption and sluggishness. So yeah, like the other person says: DEFINETELY still beta. And yes, I report the issues.
Yeah, I am mainly using firefox on desktop, but orion on the phone because this is the only way to get extensions on ios. I do have crashes once in a while in certain websites. It is annoying, but, for me personally, being able to use certain extensions (ublock, dark reader etc) makes it worth the occasional crash.
Do you have a significant number of tabs opened? I've noticed a similar issue and my hunch is it was due to "tab rot".
I’ve found this to be the case, but I absolutely do not consider this acceptable. It’s just uncontrolled memory use. I also experience this on Safari though, so I suspect it’s a WebKit issue.
I've been using this browser for several months now. I think it's the best option if you want access the addons that are available in Firefox for Android. However, the browser is definitely still beta. I often encounter bugs, mostly with tab behavior. These are still pretty manageable though, and worth the tradeoff to me.
Orion does NOT support all Firefox/Chromium extensions. Many extensions only work partly;
The fact that it does not produce errors, does not mean it works.
I hate that they (Kagi) make it *look like* extensions work…
For reference, a cheat sheet: https://orionfeedback.org/d/2174-crowdsourced-list-of-extens...
I've been using Adguard for a couple years and have had no problems. I think I've only seen ads slip through a couple times. If there's anyone who's able to compare, is there any real difference between these ad blockers?
AdGuard always bothered me. On macOS it sits in the menubar and has about a half dozen extensions that load into Safari. It felt like a bloated sprawling mess. I just installed uBOL and it's a single extension that sits in Safari. It feel much more clean and unobtrusive.
> has about a half dozen extensions that load into Safari
That’s because there’s a limit on the number of filters per extension. uBO may eventually need to do the same.
Interesting...
https://adguard.com/kb/adguard-for-safari/solving-problems/r...
Sounds like I should direct a portion of my ire toward Apple on this.
Absolutely not. They are trying to protect you, can you imagine how awful Safari would be if it let you sideload such nasty extensions? It would be just like Chrome, absolutely no market variation to speak of! Despicable.
It's really AdGuard's fault for failing to fit their functionality within the arbitrary constraints Apple decided was suitable for a runtime.
It is not an arbitrary decision.
For one Safari compiles block lists to perform better, but it can be noticed at startup for big lists.
Then there is just resource constraints since the focus is mobile. Chrome on mobile notably supports no extensions.
But I do wish desktop Safari was more lenient.
Chrome's decision is also entirely arbitrary, so it's not a great example. Firefox on mobile notable supports Chrome extensions, without any real issues or battery drain whatsoever.
You can disable the menu bar icon in settings...
That’s in fact one of the gripes I have with certain MacOS software. It would be far better if menu bar icons were opt-in rather than opt-out. The average non-technical user eventually ends up having tons of these icons in the menu bar.
The latest version will let you remove them even if the app itself doesn't let you.
I mean, that’s great, but it would be even better if MacOS required explicit permissions before allowing an app to place an icon in the menu bar.
The existence of a menubar icon as an option implies it’s a service that needs to run all the time. I compare that perception to what uBOL mentions in the App Store description.
> uBOL is entirely declarative, meaning there is no need for a permanent uBOL process for the filtering to occur, and CSS/JS injection-based content filtering is performed reliably by the browser itself rather than by the extension. This means that uBOL itself does not consume CPU memory resources while content blocking is ongoing -- uBOL's service worker process is required _only_ when you interact with the popup panel or the option pages.
I believe if you do that, the filter lists don't auto-update. That's the reason for the menu bar app.
Just adding another alternative that I've been using for years for people to consider - 1Blocker.
https://1blocker.com/
1Blocker is worth the one time lifetime purchase, works with your family iCloud+ account.
This and Little Snitch Mini.
I cancelled my Adguard subscription when I found out the founder and team are russian. That's big enough of a difference for me.
Used to be Russian. The company moved to Cyprus.
Most of their software (including AdGuard for Safari and AdGuard Home) is open source, so there's little chance of anything nefarious happening.
Except there's no easy way to verify that what you get from the store has been built, unmodified, from the public source - afaik.
(I still use AdGuard fwiw)
AdGuard Home has no "store". You download it yourself. I believe the same is possible for the Safari plugin - they're not required to be obtained from the App Store.
Adguard is still better because it ships multiple extensions that you can enable to bypass filter limit on iOS. uBlock Origin Lite is not able to block annoying Google sign in pop ups, yet.
i've also been using adguard for years. Yes it's paid, but it actually works. I use it on mac and ios. none of the free( at the time) ad blockers worked as well. or they constantly needed updates, or certain things broke etc. adguard is a great product. not affiliated, not sponsored, just a user.
It's even better than you say because the free version—for Safari only—works very well.
Thanks for asking this. I have always had Adguard on iOS with no issues wondering if there is any extra benefit to switching to uBlock Origin Lite on Safari.
Adguard on macOS constantly runs an Electron app in the background :(
It doesn't. The Electron app is for settings, and you can just quit it.
I’ve been testing it in beta for a month or so and I can report that at least to me websites load much faster than with Adguard or Wipr.
Commercial offerings can always slip towards allowing some ads for pay.
Maybe not today, but there's no guarantee the company won't get sold tomorrow.
Not to mention that your AdGuard seems to be one of the 10 billion apps that competes for my subscriptions budget.
It's been a few years since I've used an Iphone, but back then I used AdGuard. It wasn't terrible, but I encountered frequent breakage, and updating it (rules) was miserable and slow.
The generally awful and sad state of web browing on IOS was a big reason why I switched to Android.
Weird, it's installed but it won't let me enable it in Safari. The "enable" checkbox is inactive. Safari 18.5 on MacOS Sequoia 15.5. Restarting the browser, and reinstalling the extension has no effect.
Solution: update to Sequoia 15.6 (which comes with Safari 18.6) and it works.
This makes me think that UBO Lite wasnt possible without something Apple added in the latest version. Is this true? Did they finally add something to Safari allowing UBO Lite to finally be made? Is that why UBO Lite for Safari didnt exist until now?
it did work but there was some bugs that they were waiting on the update to fix for them.
this worked, thank you
same here, on Sequoia 15.5 (24F74)
This app is currently not available in your country or region.
From @gorhill himself: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/issues/358#issueco...
Let's wait a bit
App Store developers have to declare whether or not they're a "trader" in the EU, so that might be the issue.
https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=einwn76m
I think you were spot on. Should be fixed now.
Not available in the Netherlands/Europe.
Had no problem finding and downloading it from the AppStore; then again, it's been ten hours since you posted, so maybe it has only just popped up in the last couple of hours for people in the Netherlands.
Yep, indeed. It now downloads in the Apps store for The Netherlands
Not available in Czechia/EU
I'm in CH and it's available to me but I can never remember if I'm set to the Swiss store or the USA store...
Ok, just looked and I think I'm on the Swiss store. Well, at least you guys get the option of adding non-apple app stores while we do not.
Can confirm. I hope that they enable it before the Testflight build expires.
Sweden/Europe, same
You can use the Testflight version.
Unavailable here in Denmark too.
Too late to edit the above, but it seems to be available now.
… and you are in what country/region?
Germany/Europe, not available for me.
Also not available in Austria
Bulgaria/Europe - also not available
Same, not available in Spain.
For me as well
Neither in France.
Seems to be available now but it was not some hours before.
For me as well
The beauty of Apple. As if there’s any actual technical limitation in distributing a binary over the internet.
The developer chooses which countries to make their app/extension available. Apple doesn't make the decision.
That's not a feature I'm required to use on Android, MacOS, Windows or Linux. If it's not Apple's decision to enforce it then I wonder who would degrade the experience like that?
I've been puzzled reading previous discussions about Safari where people acted as if it doesn't have good ad-blocking, just because the brand name extension they're familiar with wasn't available. There has been very good ad-blocking available on Safari for a long time (both macOS and iOS) using for example AdGuard.
Ad blockers on Safari effectively have the same weaknesses as ad blockers on Chrome now have since the deprecation of the blocking webRequest API (which Safari never supported).
See https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b... for some examples of things you can't do without those APIs.
> the blocking webRequest API (which Safari never supported)
This is inaccurate. Safari (Mac) supported it until 2019, and indeed there was a version of uBlock Origin for Safari back then.
I don't think uBlock Origin ever supported Safari?
https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158
Ah, unofficial fork
It was a fork. I'm not sure what you mean exactly by "unofficial". Gorhill said at the time that he didn't have time to maintain a Safari version, but he was aware of the fork, which mostly shared code with upstream, and seemingly endorsed the fork.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/About-Safari-and-Cana...
Interesting, thanks for the correction.
As I understand it, AdGuard uses (in addition to a browser extension) a system-level local network proxy so can do anything to requests and responses?
Confusingly, there are 3 offerings: "AdGuard for Mac", "AdGuard for iOS" and "AdGuard for Safari" and I think it's the first 2 that are the good stuff, even for Safari.
that said, gorhill has made a decent effort on making most uBlock/Adguard filter rules work within dNR.
the only problem is that you just don't have any choice for custom filters, it relies on prebaked resources.
Which is not a Safari restriction. Applications are allowed to revise those resources, they are not hardcoded into the bundle.
For privacy aware people it can be important that an open source and well trusted extension is available.
It's been possible for about a decade to use Firefox Focus as a Content Blocker for Safari. I assume it's open source, "well trusted" is of course subjective.
Firefox Focus doesn't exist on Mac, though.
I thought the whole point of iOS and macOS content blockers is that it does not have to be trusted, since there is never any data flowing out, only a list of blocked IP addresses that the operating system refers to (like a windows hosts (file).
My experience has been that installing AdGuard on my iPhone made no noticeable difference. To be fair, I barely browse on my phone. Basically only news sites and Reddit/HN. But apart from HN I see ads on all of those pages.
So I am just a puzzled by your point of view :) May I ask which App you are using? I would love to be proven wrong and have an ad-free browsing experience in the future.
Not sure what to troubleshoot with AdGuard, but from consulting mine that's working well, I'd ensure that both "Safari protection" and "Advanced protection" are enabled in its app, and that all of its Safari extensions in the system Settings app are enabled (and the main one is set to "All Websites: Allow").
Ah thanks! I only have Safari protection enabled, the advanced one requires me to pay (though I don't remember that from when I installed it a couple of months ago).
Saw someone else in this thread mention the Orion browser - I will give that a try for now. If I'm not satisfied I'll try paying for AdGuard. Thanks for the reply though!
Adblocking as links bloking can be sufficient, but sometimes you need to bring the big guns and alter the page content itself. Safari has even "Hide distracting elements" now, which can not be an extension. That cements the idea that most uBlock Origin features should be part of the browser to make it a wonderful user agent.
It's been possible to use Content Blockers for Safari for a long time, which alters the page content. Firefox Focus came out about a decade ago, and can be used as one.
There's a reason why this is uBlock Origin Lite and not uBlock Origin. Still works, but can't do the same thing as the extension for Firefox (desktop), for example.
The same thing happened when Chrome dropped mv2 support and a brand name ad blocking extention never upgraded beyond mv2.
Just tested it out on iOS. It’s scored 94% against Adguard’s 79% on this test page: https://adblock.turtlecute.org/
Those webpages used to "test" blockers are frowned upon, see: https://x.com/gorhill/status/1583581072197312512
There are many reasons that sort of online tools are not able to reliably test a content blocker:
- Many content blockers are designed to fool pages to think no content blocker is installed
- Content blockers filter according to real, actual cases, not synthetic cases used in their tests
Would you be supportive of an "adblock test page" that literally just reports if the adblocker is working correctly, rather than how good it is? Like maybe an EICAR-like rule that is added to EasyList that matches an element on that page?
I just tested with Firefox and uBlock Origin in the stricter "medium mode" and got a score of 1%. So yeah, I don't think these test pages are that great.
I'm using AdGuard with Mac Safari and I get 96%. Perhaps this is a configuration issue. But if that site doesn't test for false positives, which it doesn't seem to, I'd say the result is pretty meaningless.
I got 7% with uBO Lite on iOS. The test doesn't seem that reliable.
It says on the page that ublock origin breaks the results. Now that might be the full firefox version but in my test with Firefox the result was 1 blocked on the page but 125 on the extensions own notification.
I’m getting different results for it with every reload, is that normal? Ranges form 56-96%
Wipr 2 full 100%
Must depend on your block lists, I get a 98% using AdGuard on iOS. I'm using easy list, easy privacy, fanboy annoyances and social filters, and hagezi's light dns filter. I'm a big fan of ublock but I don't see much issue with AdGuard for now.
Wipr 2 scores 100%
Wipr2 gets 100.
I moved from Chrome to Firefox for this.
And found out Firefox is much better browser than Chrome anyway. Moved due to post here as well. Can’t find the post easily to link here for credit.
I get the best of all worlds by using Orion, I can use uBlock Origin (the Firefox version) and also get WebKit which Safari uses. Orion seemed unstable for me, but I gave it another shot a couple of months ago, and it has been as stable as Safari for me. Glad to hear someone gave Safari another AdBlock alternative though, the more, the merrier.
I don’t know. I have tried to use Orion for long time but it has too many bugs. I try it like few times week. Also, this extension seems to work better than uBlock in Origin.
How do you find Orion for web development (if you do any of that)?
Sorry I don't do any web dev, I only do firmware/uefi/bios
Using an ipad on the internet is so incomprehensibly bad without adblocking that I just don't even use it for normal browsing. The problem is I would rather use a website instead of an app because at least I can adblock the website (sans pihole or something). It was actually making me consider going back to an android tablet but here is a potential solution. Except it is not supported for my version of Safari (for now?). Awesome.
I installed the app on my iPad iOS 18.5, then tried to enable the extension in Safari. (Settings -> Apps -> Safari -> Extensions).
Result: "uBo Lite" is not supported by this version of Safari"
Am I stupid or is there no way to actually get to the configure Safari page from within Safari? Like any other program in existence would do.
You need to update to 18.6 for this to work
Yup, same thing here. Gonna try on my Mac soon. Will keep us updated.
Looking forward to try it once it becomes available in my region. Although I wish I could just use extensions on iOS Firefox… Or at least have a way to sync my bookmarks between Firefox and Safari.
Duckduckgo browser is highly rated than Firefox in Apple Store. Has anyone tried it? Is it really better than Firefox?
Unfortunately apply doesn’t allow ublock in Firefox like android.
PS this comment is with reference to Apple Store and policies discussion in one of the threads
Gave it a try; works better than expected. Has the custom filter tool (similar to element picker in main Origin), so I can block out the Linkedin Feed and other pestilence that Wipr couldn't tackle.
Thanks a million to gorhill!
I switched to Brave about 2 months ago and never looked back. The speed difference is astonishing, just mind-blowing. I was always convinced that Safari was the fastest on macOS. And mind you that I did use an adblock with Safari as well (AdGuard for mac).
I tried the beta. UBOlite interfered with Safari’s native hide distracting items. The UI was unintuitive for setting features. Performance seemed slower than Ghostery. I’m sticking with Ghostery, which has none of those issues, until UBOlite matures.
Is there any reason people don't use Brave browser, when it seems it has great ad blocking built in and working great?
Safari is faster and uses less battery/power.
Requires iOS 18.0+ sadly older iOS not supported :-(
Tangential: Anyone here using Magic Lasso? I can't stomach the idea of subscribing to an ad blocker for about 30 dollars each year and have wondered what it provides compared to others. I've been using Firefox Focus (it has an content blocker too), AdGuard and NextDNS (which is flaky because I don't want to have a profile and instead use the long abandoned app, whose toggle doesn't work many a times [tested by visiting test.nextdns.io]). For system wide tracker blocking, I use Lockdown Privacy (the free option).
When I try to turn it on in Safari (iOS 18.5) I get:
Same issue on macOS with Safari 18.5. I think it might require a newer version (18.6), see https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/issues/405.
so update it?
Works excellent, better than Adguard for me.
I didn't change any default settings in either.
On the settings page of the extension, I got a popup to allow "ib.adnxs.com" access to browsing data. What is this?
I suspect it's this bug: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=295336
ib.adnxs.com is AppNexus/Xandr's ad network domain. This popup likely appears when the extension detects the domain trying to access your data and is prompting you whether to block it, not requesting permission for itself.
uBlock origin (full version) works quite nicely on Orion Browser, which is safari under the hood but supports FF extensions and chrome extensions.
Anyone know if there's a possibility this will be available in older versions of iOS? I'm very reluctant to update my iPhone. It's working well right now, and it seems just about impossible to roll back an update if it breaks something important.
What will it break? You can stay out of date but you’re more vulnerable to security vulnerabilities and less stuff works.
I have been using the version published in Testflight for quite a while now and I must say I haven't seen much difference from my previous setup (Firefox Focus configured as the ad blocking provider in Safari settings)
But, given their record on providing excellent software and features, I am so happy to switch to them and to see what they are capable of in the future!
Content blockers on iOS are severely limited compared to what's possible with powerful extension mechanisms (Firefox, Chrome before Manifest V3) or built-in ad blockers (Brave). So there's not really differentiation on a technical level, which is where uBlock Origin was always strong. On these other platforms, there was a lot of innovation going on when I was in the space (2020), especially against sites that actively try to circumvent ad blockers. On iOS, there's not much that can be done. At least unless I missed some major developments.
As for the lists of resources to block and DOM elements to hide - which is by and large all an iOS ad blocker is - most just use the popular ones like EasyList with a few additions. uBlock Origin has a good track record of maintaining additional filters, so I think there's reason to believe it'll work better than most.
But all in all, for these two reasons, you probably won't notice much of a difference between different ad blockers on iOS.
Great news!
You unfortunately can't add custom filters/cosmetic rules since this is the Lite version, rigth?
“Ubo isn’t supported in this version of safari” -iOS 18.5
so update it?
I don't understand why Safari (and any browser) does not include ad blocking out of the box, ideally enabled by default but at least an option. Nobody like ads. Especially ads that take over a majority of your screen space and seem to fight efforts to close them (moving, slow response to tapping "X", etc.)
Ads are just a cancer on the web. If a site can only exist by ad revenue then it should not exist. Block them all.
Probably an anti-trust issue given their relationship with Google.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/26/23933206/google-apple-se...
I don't understand why someone, with some technical education, would use any chromium based browser instead of firefox, any ideas?
I used to work at Mozilla.
Safari isn't Chromium (it's the opposite, Google forked WebKit and they've diverged). But that's not really your point.
There's a lot of reason to use Chrome: deep integration with Google (privacy issues aside, it's really useful), better add-on dev ecosystem which leads to better add-ons, WebKit was far ahead of Gecko for a while, I personally prefer the devtools in Chrome, developers tend to verify their website works more in Chrome so fewer bugs, iOS is webkit-only, etc.
Firefox is a great browser, especially now. But so is Chrome.
probably because Safari isn't chromium and is webkit? as for using Safari over other browsers on macOS, performance and low battery/power usage.
That’s a pretty limited way of looking at the world: “Why would someone only do x instead of y?”
Part of learning to understand others means developing cognitive flexibility.
Ever since covid, I playfully ask people if they can guess why a lot of COVID non believers stocked up on toilet paper and food at the beginning of the lockdown.
Of course many say "they somehow thought it wouldn't be available later stupidly!" But I look past that one, and ask for possibly other reasons.
I have asked probably 100 people at this point.
Not a SINGLE person has said "in case they were wrong about the virus, and it was actually dangerous, they wouldn't want to leave their house to go get stuff"
That was the reason my family bought. And some of my anti COVID friends. And no one has guessed that. And they almost can't believe it or understand it.
And this is coming from people who took the virus seriously, but apparently didn't think ahead to not have to leave their house for basic dry goods?
It would be limited if it _literally_ wasn't a question, right?
I'm opening myself to understand things. I don't understand the combativeness.
I'll answer your question: 100% of web browser users do not care about which underlying engine the web browser is built on. And when they care about their web browser at all, they care about features and functionality.
Firefox kills my battery on an M4 MBP, it’s astonishing. Chromium and Webkit browsers don’t give me that problem.
Also, FF extensions still don’t support service workers, only background pages
Maybe I’m missing something, on latest macOS 15.6 it seems to be working but on my iPadOS 26 latest dev release it shows as installed but no settings. and it doesn’t ask for each website.
I’ve been using Ka-Block!
(Bonus points for being inspired by Star Trek Klingon?)
Switched from Wipr 2 on my iOS/macOS instantly. Thanks!
How come? Wipr 2 is going a good job for me. Why might I prefer uBO?
I haven't installed it but I might only because I can't disable Wipr 2 for some sites that I want/need. uBO Lite can do this. Other than that, I really like Wipr 2 and other apps by Kaylee.
Hmm, you should be able to, with instructions at https://kaylees.site/wipr-help.html#how-do-i-disable-wipr
(Not trying to talk you out of it. I have no dog in the hunt; use whatever you like. Just helping an Internet peer troubleshoot, as is my wont.)
This doesn’t work on my iPhone 16
Edit: after upgrading the software, it works
i've resisted iOS 18 for so long.. Project Indigo was really tempting...but this might just be the thing pushed me to update to iOS 18....
I'm a long-time user of Wipr. Does the job perfectly.
Generally it works well, but what's particularly annoying is that it hides cookie walls, resulting in non-functional websites until I disable content blockers, close the dialog and re-enable them. Not sure if uBlock does any better, though.
Ghostery does the same, but has more fine-grained per-website controls. You can for example turn off just the consent-popup-blocker function for a website while keeping the anti-tracking ad-blocking functions.
This is my only complaint. Most of the websites work fine, but others get stuck. I don’t know if Wipr 2 solved the issue.
We occasionally have this with the actual full uBlock Origin on Firefox as well.
I don't think there's a general solution for this issue. Content blockers need to provide a workaround for each situation, if at all possible.
At least it's possible to contribute to uBlock Origin's filters.
Use a bookmarklet to sweep sticky elements for those situation. Not ideal, but works fine.
Use Safari’s own built-in “Hide Distracting Items”. It’s also pretty good at hiding the few remaining “disable your ad blocker to continue” popups Wipr doesn’t yet catch.
Origin feels much faster to me than Wipr
uBO was the only reason I switched from Safari to Firefox. Might make the switch back now.
Just became available for me in Sweden, other European countries should follow.
The title is false, because "This app is currently not available in your country or region. "
Just like that, I ditched the Chrome app on iPhone right now. This is great news.
History channel aliens guy: "is such a thing possible?"
Why is it region-locked? So weird
because the person shared the link from the US App Store instead of using the global link:
https://apps.apple.com/app/ublock-origin-lite/id6745342698 for all app stores.
I don't know if it is working, because sometimes, I see Google Adsense ads on Wordle site.
Doesn't Safari block trackers already?
Yes, but not ads.
iOS 18.5 safari can't use it. I swear I was successfully using the beta. Guess I'll try upgrading to iOS 18.6.
Ok, updated and can be activated on iOS 18.6 safari.
Not available in all euro regions
Installs, but trying to enable in Safari throws an error: “Unable to load uBlock Origin Lite.”
Update iOS to 18.6
Thank you.
Thats the one thing about Apple products. You get all the features of SOTA but 5-6 years after its already been in use.
is this ad blocker the best?
Nice. Although there are content blockers for the iPhone, uBLock is the best. One of the worst aspects of iOS is that content blockers for it generally suck, and the web sucks without them.
Funny how ‘Improved Search’ really means ‘Good luck finding anything unless we get paid.’
"This app is currently not available in your country or region."
"This app is currently not available in your country or region."
:(
A friendly reminder that uBlock Origin Lite can't protect you from modern ad tracking. Consider using Firefox with the original version on desktop and support the EU pushing Apple to allow alternative browser engines on iOS.
More details:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin#uBlock_Origin_Li...
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
Doesn't work on iOS
After installation you need to enable it in Settings -> Apps -> Safari -> Extensions -> uBlock Origin Lite.
I also uninstalled my previous advertising blocker AdBlock Pro by selecting "Delete App" in Settings -> General -> iPhone Storage -> AdBlock Pro.
Finally IOS users can experience what I do on my cheap android phones where I've been playing youtube ad-free on firefox mobile for about a decade.
iOS has had adblockers that work with YouTube for years...uBlock origin is good but it's not the only one
Do you think uBlock is the only ad blocker? Safari on iOS has had ad blockers for ten years.
From the permissions in Safari:
> Web Page Contents and Browsing History - Can read and alter sensitive information on web pages, including passwords, phone numbers and credit cards, and see your browsing history on the current tab's web page when you use the extension.
What does it mean for me to use the extension? Am I using it if it is installed?
Reading and altering content on web pages is the purpose of the extension.
That does not answer the question in any way. Especially, since it claims to use zero CPU when active and because iOS ad blocking works differently.
> it claims to use zero CPU
There is no claim of "zero CPU". The claim is that the service worker wakes up only when necessary -- it is designed to be suspended by default from the ground up.
In Optimal and Complete modes, the content scripts will of course execute, without the service worker being unsuspended if no filtering occurs, but perform only the necessary work and bail out ASAP if not needed.
In Basic or "No filtering" modes, no content scripts are injected.
---
Edit: Sorry, I do say "uBOL itself does not consume CPU/memory resources while content blocking is ongoing". When I say "itself" I am referring to the service worker as seen in Chromium's Task Manager. The service worker isn't required for examples when navigating to `example.com` or here at `news.ycombinator.com`. All top content blockers I have looked at do require their service worker to execute, even for merely just switching between tabs. Some even use tricks to prevent their service worker to be suspended at all.
The warning message you mentioned simply means that the extension can inject "content scripts" into the web pages you visit. This feature is necessary, for example, to remove ads that cannot be blocked via HTTP.
Installation is the first step, then you must enable it.
If you go to safari settings and enable it there, then you are using it.
Bizarrely when I do that it tells me “uBO Lite is not supported by this version of Safari”.
On an iPhone 13 with the latest version of iOS.
I’m very new to the Apple ecosystem so it could well be that it’s meant to work on a laptop/desktop rather than the mobile version.
I could of course be wrong: does anybody know better? Or is it a case of me being frazzled after work?
EDIT: some users have suggested upgrading to iOS 18.6 solves this problem. Doing it as we speak!
And then am I using it if I'm loading the extension by interacting with it? Because simply enabling it will not give it access to the webpage.
loading a page will