uBlock Origin Lite now available for Safari (opens in new tab)

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.

Screw Chrome; both Safari and Chrome are inferior to Firefox' adblocking toolkit

And for the record Ublock Origin used to have a Safari extension. But that was forced to be phased out a couple of OS updates ago for reasons I can't remember.

In any case, as someone who will not touch Google's spyware browser with a ten-foot pole, it's nice to have a flagship alternative to Firefox that does decent adblocking.

I 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.

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.

> 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?

I imagine Apple has 20 billion reasons annually why not to enhance adblocking.

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.

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.

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.

It seems to require iOS 18.6, it’s working for me after updating.

> 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.)

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.

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.

Update your iphone and it will work

Finally you can block ads on mobile? I've been using AdGuard for iOS Safari for ten years or so.

>> “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.

I got the Australian one by replacing `cn` with `au` in the link.

https://apps.apple.com/au/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...

Thank you for the link. Can some moderator please update the link? Thanks in advance.

Updated, thanks!

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.

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).

Apple is really bad at search, and on purpose. Welp, money before quality!

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).

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.

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

I get shown a fucking ad for Google Chrome when searching for “ublock origin lite” in the iOS app store.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Solution: update to Sequoia 15.6 (which comes with Safari 18.6) and it works.

same here, on Sequoia 15.5 (24F74)

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.

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

For me as well

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

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.

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).

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.

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 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

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

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.

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?

What will it break? You can stay out of date but you’re more vulnerable to security vulnerabilities and less stuff works.

Update iOS to 18.6

How come? Wipr 2 is going a good job for me. Why might I prefer uBO?

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

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.

Safari is faster and uses less battery/power.

Probably an anti-trust issue given their relationship with Google.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/26/23933206/google-apple-se...

uBlock Origin Lite has existed for only 2 years.

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

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.

Requires fixes in iOS 18.6 for Safari

so update it?

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...

Yes, but not ads.

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.

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

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.