Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

  • Hacker News
  • Scrolling through the comments reading about all the adblockers that folks recommend makes my head spin. Why exactly should I trust any of these to have full access to my browser? Looking through the app store I see so many that are clearly trying to impersonate the well known ones by using similar names. It sounds like uBlock Origin Lite is trusted by many, but watch out for Ublock and 1Block, which are also top App Store results. Going off memory, the the chrome store is even worse. The whole situation is extremely sketchy. This is not even to mention supply chain attacks which could hijack even honest projects.

    Personally I’ve settled on blocking at the DNS level with unbound and a blocklist. It’s not perfect but it limits the blast radius.

  • > but watch out for Ublock and 1Block, which are also top App Store results.

    Honestly this is more of an App Store issue than an Adblock one. For all of Apple's purported talents in curation, they really cannot seem to filter out the odd trojan horses: https://blog.lastpass.com/posts/warning-fraudulent-app-imper...

  • >Why exactly should I trust any of these to have full access to my browser?

    Content blockers on iOS don't have "full access". Most adblocking apps provide both a content blocker and an extension, the latter of which is used to work around stuff that content blockers can't block, or bugs that result as of blocking scripts from loading, but they're not needed. You can get 95% of the functionality by just using content blockers.

  • A more native open-source version:

    https://github.com/0xCUB3/wBlock

  • I’ve been using wBlock and it is fantastic. It supports nearly identical functionality as compared to uBlock Origin Lite.
  • I wanted uBlock Origin Lite to win, but based on my personal experience with uBlock Origin Lite, 1Blocker, and Wipr, I find that 1Blocker blocks far more on the sites I visit. uBlock Origin Lite and Wipr are roughly equal in second place. YMMV.

    It helps to run everything by Cover Your Tracks[1], too.

    1. https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

  • Personally I’ve been using Brave browser on desktop and iOS. It has some of the best adblocking on mobile. Also use adguard pro which provides dns level filtering.
  • Why do you need AdGuard Pro and Brave blocking? Isn’t that duplicative?
  • Vivaldi is mine as it blocks YouTube ads and lets me play yt videos with the screen locked.
  • The normal uBlock origin extension can be installed on Orion browser for iOS

    Orion is webkit and can be set as default browser.

    by joak
  • How does Orion manages to run chrome and firefox extensions when even iOS chrome and firefox browsers can’t?
    by ilt
  • Unfortunately uBlock Origin on Orion is a bit flaky. Also, the phone heats up a bit, but that might be due to Orion itself.
  • Is this legitimate? I can’t find any reference to this on Raymond Hill’s github or ublock’s web site.
  • In all these years I haven’t found a better solution than DNS blocking with NextDNS on iOS. The only place I get ads is YT (but for that I have an Albanian VPN)
  • Safari ads are not blocked when using NextDNS. Is it just me?
  • Why not pay for YouTube premium instead of paying for an Albanian VPN? Then your money goes to the video makers you watch.
  • How does the Albanian VPN help? No ad revenue in Albania?
  • Why not just pay for a subscription instead of VPN?
  • I block YouTube ads on iOS by watching in the browser (with no YouTube app installed) and using AdGuard.
  • I read that if/when Google find out that you’re not actually Albanian they’ll immediately band your entire account. So I wouldn’t recommend doing this trick for your main Google account that has your email and Google drive stuff….etc. you likely want to create a burner account just for this.

    Also do you connect to the Albanian VPN all the time? That would mean all the websites you connect to now think your in Albania

  • If you're in Europe, there's the newly launched DNS4EU project which is free for personal use, and also includes adblocking at the DNS level like NextDNS.

    I use it in conjunction with Adguard and secure DNS, but they also publish configuration profiles for iOS.

    https://www.joindns4.eu/

    https://www.joindns4.eu/dns-guidelines

  • I had been wishing for uBlock Origin for Safari for years, but now that it’s here (I’ve been using it since the betas), I’m disappointed. It’s really ugly to look at (even the icon in the toolbar looks out of place), configuration is awkward and resets itself unless you give it full permissions for every website from the get go, and it doesn’t seem to be more effective than other popular blockers. Additionally, pretty much every other blocker includes several extensions to overcome the well-known 150K rule limit, but uBlock Origin only includes one, meaning it can’t be blocking as much.
  • It works for me, but not as good as the ones based on content list filters. It's also brings odd problems: google.com breaks on first search request, but ipv6.google.com does not.
  • And it doesn't work anymore when you swipe back. The phone shows the previous page but without any adblocking.

    I too hoped for a ublock origin with filters lists, kind of what we have on Firefox or even the lite version for chrome but it's not nearly as good.

    And we can't say it's apple fault because other adblockers like Adguard does allow customs lists and custom rules.

  • The lack of proper adblocker on iOS is what convinced me to use the Brave browser instead of Firefox or Safari. An adblocker is included by default.

    And as a bonus : possibility to keep music videos playing while changing app. (A parameter has to be switched for that though)

    by mlok
  • What? iOS has had "proper adblockers" for years now. It's literally why I switched to iOS. Android was forcing ads in all sorts of places, and forcing things into webviews that had no adblocking. Being able to install adblock that even works in webviews was a huge advantage of iOS to me.
  • iOS Safari has adblock support; I've been using AdGuard for years. It's a little bit of a hack, but you can also get system-level ad-block in every app by using Lockdown. Lockdown works by registering itself as a VPN that works kinda like an on-device PiHole.
  • Every time I read this I ask for example of which web pages do you see ads using 1Blocker that uses th4 content blocking framework that has been around for a decade.
  • I recently switched to trying iOS after all of Google's recent Android nonsense and tried all the options. Brave didn't make the cut as it failed to block all the embedded ads on reddit (my personal litmus test). The Orion browser, OTOH, did a great job at it.. and it also supports the full version of ublock-origin if I need even better ad-blocking. It has a few rough edges, but is working out to be a nice default web browser for the phone.