Hacker News Reader

Comment by damnesian | Hacker News Reader

I am a developer on a team of developers for a large data and interaction-rich website and we've watched the stats morph over the past 8 years from 23% mobile to 23% desktop. It's been a very swift revolution. I do a lot of QA on my phone now. I have been a Firefox proponent for at least ten years and resolved to do most of my QA on FF since I was most familiar with its features. Something that is very irksome about iOS is I can't suppress ads on Firefox on ios but I can on Safari. So Safari has become my main mobile browser. I'd love to keep pushing FF into the future- and still use it as my main desktop browser- but I can't advocate its use at least on iOS because of the ads issue.

View on HN

Any browser on iOS is just a skin of safari, as all browsers on iOS must use the safari webview in the backend. Apple doesn't allow these browsers to use safari extensions.

I mean, since iOS 11 you can apply a WKContentRuleList to a WKWebView. It's not like some form of ad blocking can't exist on Firefox for iOS.

There’s Firefox Focus which blocks many ads (also works as a blocker for safari)

your problem is not FF, it's the iphone, replace your phone and you'll have the browser you want with the extensions you want. Don't blame the innocents.

You can't use uBlock Origin on iOS?

Every time I have even the slightest mild thought of trying iOS again, I learn something like this which ensures I will not do it.

You can adblock at the DNS level using the AdGuard DNS plug-in for iOS. Not an app: it’s a system plug-in - https://adguard.com/en/blog/encrypted-dns-ios-14.html. It’s extremely effective across all apps that use third-party supplied ads. The only apps it cannot adblock on are those who serve up ads from the same source as their content, such as Pinterest and YouTube.

No. But you can block third-party ads on all apps that display them by using the AdGuard DNS plug-in for iOS. Not an app - it’s a system plug-in: https://adguard.com/en/blog/encrypted-dns-ios-14.html. It’s extremely effective across all apps that use third-party supplied ads. The only apps it cannot adblock on are those who serve up ads from the same source as their content, such as Pinterest and YouTube.

Not the extensions but you can use Brave browser that has its own built-in ad blocker.

nextdns.io works very well on iOS.

I use it on desktop/laptop also and have added many rules - on my profile/account at nextdns.io - with no issues.

It is very much worth a look.

It's great and I use it on mobile as well, but the lack of cosmetic filtering still makes uBlock Origin a winner. Can't really implement that with anything except extensions.

Is using this for your DNS a privacy issue?

No extensions.

Oh for fuck’s sake. Safari has had extensions since 2010, and uBlock Origin supported it until 2018.

The problem vis-a-vis uBO that in 2018, Safari switched its extension framework. It no longer supports the WebExtensions framework, instead using a native (proprietary) implementation. The new framework requires extensions to be packaged as apps, and is less featureful in terms of what extensions can do and access than the older framework. Consequently, uBlock Origin decided not to support the new extension framework (https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158).

How could u not know that all ios browsers are just reskins of Safari if u r a developer? So ios devices are not even in the discussion

Reply on news.ycombinator.com