https://apps.apple.com/au/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...
> 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?
If you go to safari settings and enable it there, then you are using it.
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!
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.
See https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b... for some examples of things you can't do without those APIs.
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.
This is inaccurate. Safari (Mac) supported it until 2019, and indeed there was a version of uBlock Origin for Safari back then.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/About-Safari-and-Cana...
the only problem is that you just don't have any choice for custom filters, it relies on prebaked resources.
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.
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!
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!
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.
ublock origin lite
“ublock origin lite”
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.
When I search "uBlock origin" it doesn't seem to show up at all.
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?
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.
(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)
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.
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.
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).
Nonetheless, a critical engagement of software "safety" would require another few thousand words, at least.
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.
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.
It breaks my heart to see how far they’ve fallen.
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-...)
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.
They are so complicit in garbage rebill apps, it's pathetic.
What is it supposed to do?
I never pay for anything recurring. Most are scams anyway.
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.
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.
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.
tfw you're a big tech engineer/PM who does the right thing for your users but get blamed anyway
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 have noticed and appreciate the change, so my headcanon is that they actually do read feedback. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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
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.
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.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer]
"DisableSearchBoxSuggestions"=dword:00000001It's sad there needs to be a third-party app for local Windows search, but it works . . .
I think it's reasonable to expect better from them.
Why promote an app with 100 sales over another with 10,000?
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).
Worse if there's no filter, worse if it's a dropdown and there's no way to type the desired name, only look.
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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
ublock origin lite
I get it in position 1 one (after one unrelated ad).
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
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.
The generally awful and sad state of web browing on IOS was a big reason why I switched to Android.
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.
That’s because there’s a limit on the number of filters per extension. uBO may eventually need to do the same.
https://adguard.com/kb/adguard-for-safari/solving-problems/r...
Sounds like I should direct a portion of my ire toward Apple on this.
It's really AdGuard's fault for failing to fit their functionality within the arbitrary constraints Apple decided was suitable for a runtime.
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.
> 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.
Most of their software (including AdGuard for Safari and AdGuard Home) is open source, so there's little chance of anything nefarious happening.
(I still use AdGuard fwiw)
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?
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.
Whether it's technical or social the situation on iOS is clearly inferior.
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...
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.
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.
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
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
$ xcrun safari-web-extension-converter --bundle-identifier <bundle ID> .
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.
I note that they say the command has changed from the one I used, it’s now:
xcrun safari-web-extension-packager
Every time this happens, I tell myself, “maybe it’s time to try and android phone”
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.
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.
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)
2nd edition here, and I updated to 18.6 days ago.
This is based on my personal observation of different devices. I could be wrong.
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.)
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.
> This feels like a series of failures
Your "device" is too old, because you failed to pay Apple recently enough.
Thanks a million to gorhill!
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
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...
https://apps.apple.com/app/ublock-origin-lite/id6745342698 for all app stores.
Edit: after upgrading the software, it works
:(
More details:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin#uBlock_Origin_Li...
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
You unfortunately can't add custom filters/cosmetic rules since this is the Lite version, rigth?
I also uninstalled my previous advertising blocker AdBlock Pro by selecting "Delete App" in Settings -> General -> iPhone Storage -> AdBlock Pro.
Result: "uBo Lite" is not supported by this version of Safari"
Unable To Load “uBlock Origin Lite”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.
Part of learning to understand others means developing cognitive flexibility.
I'm opening myself to understand things. I don't understand the combativeness.
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?
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.
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.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/26/23933206/google-apple-se...
(Bonus points for being inspired by Star Trek Klingon?)
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.
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
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.
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.
Walled gardens are an abomination.
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.
> 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.
I didn't change any default settings in either.
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
JoeriBe•16h ago
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comrade1234•15h ago
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.
Squarex•15h ago
Philpax•15h ago
morphle•15h ago
chronogamous•4h ago
morphle•2h ago
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messe•12h ago
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smarx007•12h ago
Let's wait a bit
lapcat•11h ago
https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=einwn76m
smarx007•10h ago
arational•10h ago