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Comment by fsa3d4uyuiy | Hacker News Reader

Question about that:

What I personally do most on my phone is browsing the web (when not at home, at home I can do that with a regular computer). On Android I can use Firefox with plugins to block ads, kill overlays, etc... and especially it has the reader mode

AFAIK on iPhone you can only run one Apple-approved browser and all others are a skin around that, and it doesn't have plugins.

To me browsing the web is unusable without those plugins in Firefox. How is browsing the web on an iPhone? Do you get overlays, autoplaying videos and ads on websites or can you block them? Do you get a reader mode?

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Safari has extensions you can get from the App Store including ad blockers, overlay removers etc

Does it also have extensions like redirect to old.reddit and such? If so, then it sounds like it would allow more user control than the latest versions of firefox of android, is this really true?

Yes https://apps.apple.com/us/app/oldr-redirect-for-reddit/id158...

You can also have Reddit links opened automatically in eg Apollo.

I’m looking for a plugin where I can define my own custom mappings (via regex-like patterns). Anyone know such a plugin?

Is it also possible to make and use your own plugins?

Also I'm a bit confused that browser plugins are apps. Are they actually running as individual apps, or part of the browser?

Can they get taken down?

Yes, but I don’t know what’s like without a developer account.

All extensions are distributed as native apps, usually bundled into the primary app and are (when applicable) installed into Safari when they’re installed onto the device.

There are Content Blockers, App Extensions (into/out of Safari), Web Extensions (“of” Safari), share extensions etc with different limitations and abilities that run individually within their apps and message Safari and other apps, or have rules read ahead of time by Safari with no runtime access, or run within Safari using the WebExtension API etc etc

The archetypal web browser plug-in via the WebExtension API totally exists and are convertible for the most part to Safari’s very proprietary but very user conscious ecosystem.

https://developer.apple.com/safari/extensions/

the API for content blockers is more limited, so it's not going to be as good as ublock origin, but yes, they do exist

Those extensions don't work with other browsers, though.

There is a systemwide ad-blocker available called MYbloXX[0] that I've been using on a jb iPhone, but you can also use it on a stock iOS device with the caveat that you have to do a device restore to be able to apply the configuration. The web site is a bit cheese but the developer has been doing this for years and it works really well, across all apps. You can see the PAC file it uses here[1]

Alternatively, I've just signed up for the Orion browser beta[2] for Mac and there is a testflight available for iOS. This can apparently use (some) WebExtensions, notably uBlock origin. I cannot run testflight apps on my old jb iPhone so I can't speak to how well it works

[0] https://myxxdev.github.io/depictions/MYbloXXforiOS/MYbloXXfo...

[1] https://myxxfm.com/script

[2] https://browser.kagi.com/

Yes there's a reader mode built in to the browser. Ad blockers are available since 2015, although these are declarative ad blockers. Custom web extensions are also available more recently; these can actually run custom JS.

I'm not sure what the implications of "declarative ad blockers" are. Do you need to manually block them or something?

allow/deny lists rather than any sort of realtime dynamic filtering

It means all ad blocking rules must be compiled and then sent to Safari. You can't, for example, execute some JavaScript to find out what elements to block. The format of these precompiled rules isn't as flexible as, say, uBlock Origin, but works well enough in practice.

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ge...

I run ad/content blockers on iOS, I watched my wife use safari the other day and was shocked at how much irritating content/ads she deals with so I installed the same one for her, works a treat.

Which blockers do you use?

AdGuard Pro and 1Blocker

Do you see a substantial benefit in combining both? I already use AdGuard Pro.

My PiHole is a must for my iOS devices.

Yes, there’s a reader mode.

Typically I use my phone when not at home since at home I have a computer to browse the web of course. Is pihole installed on your iphone? Does it work when in a train, in a restaurant somewhere, etc...?

You can use pihole over a vpn.

One common example is setting up Tailscale on Pihole and your phone and then you can set the dns on whatever Wifi you’re on to the Piholes private IP

I do desperately miss this. I’ve tried hard to get as good an experience as possible, but there’s no denying that Android wins on this one. The total closed garden approach of Apple is way overkill and I dislike it.

> Do you get overlays, autoplaying videos and ads on websites or can you block them?

I use Brave Browser on an iPhone and don’t see any of this, including ads.

Reader mode has been built into the iPhone version of Safari since 2010 and native support for third party “content blockers” since 2013.

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