uBlock Origin Lite now available for Safari | Hacker News Reader

uBlock Origin Lite now available for Safari

apps.apple.com

1,156 pointsJiahang448 comments

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!

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.

What makes you think Google Chrome is spyware?

Besides lsof and netstat?

Can you expand on this? Do they package those and use them with chrome? How are they using them?

Dude do you even know how much telemetry Chrome sends back to the mothership?

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.

Only in theory, not in practice. Every Safari adblocker I've seen also uses scripts and requests permission to "modify data on all websites", because you can't effectively block ads without that (especially pre-18.6). I assume most users grant it.

So actually, you had closed-source extensions with full access to every webpage. Literally zero privacy benefit compared to the status quo ante. I doubt Apple thought it through.

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.

> They are the same in terms of privacy protection

Only if uBO is in "Basic mode" in which case it isn't really any different than all the other regex-based content blockers. In optimal or advanced mode it "requires broad permission to read and modify data on all websites."

> legacy technology … 2015

If there’s anything that makes you feel old, it’s this.

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?

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.

I have had no issues with any bank or brokerage apps, but NFC payments with Google Pay are blocked.

I ditched my Mac after 10.15 and never looked back. Consumers will survive.

What did you get instead?

Thinkpad, Pixel, NixOS.

I'm using Librem 5, a GNU/Linux phone with PureOS (Debian derivative). Full desktop Firefox runs smoothly with all desktop plugins.

How's Librem as a daily driver? Battery life, camera, reception/calls etc? I'm eager to get a proper Linux phone, but got burned by the awful performance of Pinephone.

Librem 5 is much more performant than Pinephone, however JS-heavy websites are not very usable. NoScript is the solution. Here is a couple of good review with which I agree:

https://forums.puri.sm/t/nine-months-librem-5-as-my-only-pho...

https://forums.puri.sm/t/librem-5-fatigue/21934

https://forums.puri.sm/t/librem-5-phone-review/21085

https://forums.puri.sm/t/the-current-state-of-the-librem-5-i...

Concerning the camera: https://forums.puri.sm/t/new-post-librem-5-photo-processing-... and https://social.librem.one/tags/shotonlibrem5

Getting Apple to allow you to use Firefox? Instead of geoblocking that for EU?

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?

Most people don't know that Apple knows your location at all times (since Location Services go through their servers) and the contents of all notifications (which go through their servers too). A few apps (like Signal) go out of their way to ensure notifications are private, but most don't.

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.

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.

Yeah. Fantastic hardware, very decent OSes, mostly mediocre software, though it tends to be clean and minimalistic at least. Thank God for third-party devs and especially open-source.

> apple fangirl

Tends to be dudes, in my experience.

That’s funny, I remember the only way to block ads on my Android phone back many years ago was to root it. I was thrilled how easy it was to block ads on the iPhone when I switched.

Reverse for me. I daily drive an Android and a iPhone. Using AdGuard on both for devices for device level ad blocking. The quality of getting ads blocked on android is super high while it's medium to low on ios when using chrome.

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.

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 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.

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.

Apple has way better backwards compatibility than Android. Your 9 year old iPhone SE is still getting security updates.

iPhone SE 1st edition?

2nd edition here, and I updated to 18.6 days ago.

> 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

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.

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.

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

    $ xcrun safari-web-extension-converter --bundle-identifier <bundle ID> .

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.

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?

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 oldest supported iPhone is nearly 7 years old. Can you point to another officially supported phone that’s older?

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"?

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.

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...

Bad news: these kinds of situations are inevitable. You've abdicated control of your digital life for a comforting lie

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...

>> “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.

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

     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 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.

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.

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:

    Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
    
    [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer]
    "DisableSearchBoxSuggestions"=dword:00000001

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".

>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

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...

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.

That's what you get for letting megacorps get away with monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior.

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.

In Apple's case we can safely assume it's intentionally like that to make the most money.

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...

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.

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.

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-...)

Apple’s contempt for its customers is palpable these days.

It breaks my heart to see how far they’ve fallen.

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.

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.

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 don’t even see uBO Lite in the iOS App Store. I scrolled pretty far, too.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

App Store search takes a while to surface exact-name searches for newly released apps. No idea why.

Does anyone have the canonical link and care to share?

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 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...

tried it before and it really doesn't. new ublock lite in safari seems great so far.

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.

Just adding another alternative that I've been using for years for people to consider - 1Blocker.

https://1blocker.com/

I cancelled my Adguard subscription when I found out the founder and team are russian. That's big enough of a difference for me.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Adguard on macOS constantly runs an Electron app in the background :(

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.

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?

this worked, thank you

same here, on Sequoia 15.5 (24F74)

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.

For privacy aware people it can be important that an open source and well trusted extension is available.

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.

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.

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.

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

Not available in the Netherlands/Europe.

Not available in Czechia/EU

Sweden/Europe, same

… and you are in what country/region?

You can use the Testflight version.

Unavailable here in Denmark too.

Same, not available in Spain.

Neither in France.

For me as well

The beauty of Apple. As if there’s any actual technical limitation in distributing a binary over the internet.

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

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.

I got 7% with uBO Lite on iOS. The test doesn't seem that reliable.

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.

Wanted to move to Firefox, but it doesn't have "save page as app". Huge blocker for me unfortunately (as I categorically refuse to have GMail in one of my many tabs of one of my many browser windows).

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 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.

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)?

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.

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).

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.

uBlock origin (full version) works quite nicely on Orion Browser, which is safari under the hood but supports FF extensions and chrome extensions.

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.

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.

probably because Safari isn't chromium and is webkit? as for using Safari over other browsers on macOS, performance and low battery/power usage.

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

Unfortunately, I installed uBlock Origin Lite but it shows up disabled in Safari (MacOS). I have latest OS and Safari (MacBook Pro, Nov. 2023).

Console shows: 'Private sandbox for net.raymondhill.uBlock-Origin-Lite.Extension : <none>'

I've tried a number of things to reset Safari but still no luck.

The latest MacOS software update (just installed this morning) ... somehow addressed it.

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 to know that we have the option to use uBOL on Safari. uBO is arguably the best adblocker on Firefox (and on Chromium browsers still on manifest v2.)

Not to be a downer, but why should I use this over existing well performing content blockers like Wipr 2 or Adguard? But yes, I get it more the options for us users the merrier!

Great news!

You unfortunately can't add custom filters/cosmetic rules since this is the Lite version, rigth?

When I try to turn it on in Safari (iOS 18.5) I get:

  Unable To Load “uBlock Origin Lite”

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?

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.

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

Installs, but trying to enable in Safari throws an error: “Unable to load uBlock Origin Lite.”

Update iOS to 18.6

I didn't know macos was a relevant operating system in 2025. Everything apple does just brings the OS closer to the grave. But hey now they have adblocking, it only took how many decades? lol

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.

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.

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?

This doesn’t work on my iPhone 16

Edit: after upgrading the software, it works

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.

Origin feels much faster to me than Wipr

To get on topic, this works a hell of a lot better than 1blocker has been for me. Is this using a different API?

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.

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.

Thats the one thing about Apple products. You get all the features of SOTA but 5-6 years after its already been in use.

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...

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...

The title is false, because "This app is currently not available in your country or region. "

Ublock origin light has been available on ipados for 4 years. Why is it now a big deal?

uBlock Origin Lite has existed for only 2 years.

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/releases?page=13

I don't know if it is working, because sometimes, I see Google Adsense ads on Wordle site.

uBO was the only reason I switched from Safari to Firefox. Might make the switch back now.

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.

Just like that, I ditched the Chrome app on iPhone right now. This is great news.

Works excellent, better than Adguard for me.

I didn't change any default settings in either.

Just became available for me in Sweden, other European countries should follow.

History channel aliens guy: "is such a thing possible?"

I’ve been using Ka-Block!

(Bonus points for being inspired by Star Trek Klingon?)

“Ubo isn’t supported in this version of safari” -iOS 18.5

Requires fixes in iOS 18.6 for Safari

so update it?

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....

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.

It’s was working on 18.5 during the beta but gorhill mentioned broken sites and content blocking due to a Safari bug. That is fixed in Safari 18.6, which requires iOS 18.6

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-not...

Doesn't Safari block trackers already?

Yes, but not ads.

seems to work very well in my tests on some tough websites. finally one reason less to switch to android.

Not available in all euro regions

is this ad blocker the best?

Thank you.

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."

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.

Do you think uBlock is the only ad blocker? Safari on iOS has had ad blockers for ten years.

iOS has had adblockers that work with YouTube for years...uBlock origin is good but it's not the only one

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.

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.

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