It's a shame Firefox on iOS has failed/refused to support third-party content filters [1] since 2019. Just because they can't bring Gecko doesn't mean they shouldn't try to gain mindshare for the Mozilla Firefox brand on one of the biggest platforms, yet they refuse to put in the resources.
I'm using Orion as my daily driver on iOS mainly because of a Safari bug[1]. It used to be very buggy, had frequent app crashes for no reason at all but nowadays (since a year?) works pretty fine, even the UBO plugin works fine.
1: You can long tap and select "Download Linked File" on any link in Safari, including links that are forbidden by Content Restrictions, such as a news.ycombinator.com link from google search. Ping me if a Safari engineer sees this and fixes it!
A bug that happens for no reason? Aren’t these typically some sort of memory access violation, or am I just showing my age of what used to be the cause? I know nothing of iOS inner workings, but is illegal memory access still possible where this would be the behavior?
Honestly, I was using Orion as a daily driver for a few months now and it's crazy unreliable in my experience. It also somehow uses more RAM than Chrome/Brave doing the same things, but with lots of tiny incompatibilities.
I actually just switched my self back to chrome/brave for what I was using Orion for.
Here's my test: I install Firefox version of the plugin and enable additional filter lists like "annoyances" and "cookie notices", then go to eurogamer.net
1. I still see cookie notice
2. I open uBlock and it says "blocked on this page: 0"
I mean that they figured out how to support (most) browser extensions on iOS in their browser, unlike Firefox. They haven’t figured everything out, but I do daily drive Orion on iOS. I still prefer Firefox on desktop due to stability (and Orion’s extension advantage in mobile doesn’t extend to desktop).
That being said, after being my daily driver for almost a year, I went back to safari about a month ago with Wipr. 3x speedup and battery efficiency. Unfortunately, it became buggier instead of less buggy :(
Still use it on mac tho - vertical tabs are a game-changer.
uBlock does not work. I don't know how people check that it works for them, but for me it definitely does not.
Neither does e.g. https://getindie.wiki/ - redirects don't work and I can't even get to the settings page from the menu (it does open once after install, but afterwards the button that's supposed to open it does nothing)
UPD: Somehow installing indie wiki extension second time (without deleting it, just pressing "add to orion" a second time) partially fixed it. Redirects now works, banners are broken, showing "visit $destination$ instead"
from what i understand orion is overflowing with bugs.
even without the bugs, after everything we’ve been through with crazy shit from closed sourced browser companies, the last thing i’d install would be orion/kagi. lol nuh uh.
not a chance i’d trust an ai company with almost the entirety of my online existence—especially when they close off and hide what they’re doing.
Orion is not made by an AI company, it’s made by Kagi.
If you’re an open source or non-profit diehard then yes, it’s not that, but as far as closed source for-profit businesses go, they’re a lot better than most. They are a public benefit corporation that has rejected VC funding, and their main pitch is aligning user and company benefit, despite the mainstream currently railing against it.
I just started giving it a try again about a week ago, and I second this. A year ago it was nearly unusable for any extension outside their preferred list, now it’s largely a pleasant experience.
Those are DNS blockers. You're not going to block YouTube ads with those.
Plus, I want blocking when I'm outside of my house. I don't always want to run everything through Tailscale and Apple doesn't always make that easy. It'll turn off your VPN quite frequently...
Do you use Bitwarden with it, by any chance? I daily drove it for quite a while, about mid 2022-late 2023. Poor bitwarden support plus a pile of paper cuts drove me away. When it worked as intended, I liked it, and I'm not opposed to paying for a good browser, but it was too buggy at that time for a subscription to feel like a good deal.
I don't think I'd have called them an AI company on that basis any more than I'd call JetBrains an AI company for the same reason. But I can see why someone might call them that.
People who install Firefox on iOS is likely a very small number. If I were the project manager of Firefox, and with such limited resources and Google's cash going away any day, I would not put in any work either.
It's absolutely bonkers that an adblocker needs to cost $15/year, when the actual filter lists are maintained by volunteers and there's (presumably) very little in the way of code changes needed.
The restrictions on iOS content blockers mean that it's not possible to add value, it's just basic competence to apply pre-existing filter lists maintained by someone else.
Gorhill's browser extensions are great, have actual features. This isn't possible in iOS.
I dunno, I’m not a fan of paying for wrappers but I get a lot from 1Blocker and I’m happy to pay for it. As far as I know it’s just one dude who builds the app, and he spends a lot of time keeping it working in the face of YouTube tactics, etc.
>and he spends a lot of time keeping it working in the face of YouTube tactics, etc.
Does he? Is he doing original research, or just copying whatever ublock origin/easylist puts out? After all, all the bypass methods are just javascript snippets that extensions inject into the page, so it's not like you have to spend much time porting to iOS or whatever.
You’re assuming that the price for a product should be based on the cost to offer it. In most markets, price is a function of the value perceived by buyers and relative pricing of similar products. Cost doesn’t enter into the equation.
I'm well aware of how markets work, but that doesn't make it less bonkers. Bottled water companies take municipal water, do some "filtering", and sell it for a 10x-100x markup. I'm sure the people buying the water thinks they're getting their money's worth, but that doesn't mean we can't point out how absurd it is, nor is " in most markets, price is a function of the value perceived by buyers and relative pricing of similar products" a satisfying counterargument to that.
How many hours a month do you think is needed to “justify” charging $1.25/month?
If your time has so little value, please do create an alternative and offer the same level of support and updates for a price that seems more fair to you. $0.50/month maybe?
>If your time has so little value, please do create an alternative and offer the same level of support and updates for a price that seems more fair to you. $0.50/month maybe?
This thread is literally about someone providing a free alternative.
Unless someone else makes an equivalent product and sell it for $14/year, and every user switches to the new product, this statement is moot. A product justifies its price tag as long as people are willing to buy it at that price.
Revenue optimisation is a different concern. Would they sell more if they priced it at $10? Maybe. Would the total revenue ($10 * number of users) be higher than now? Maybe not. There is a local maxima and it appears that they calculated this to be ~$15.
>Unless someone else makes an equivalent product and sell it for $14/year, and every user switches to the new product, this statement is moot. A product justifies its price tag as long as people are willing to buy it at that price.
adguard is free and I don't think I've encountered an ad that it didn't block. There's also open source adblockers like ublock origin lite, and some other one that was mentioned earlier this year but I forgot the name of.
> adguard is free [...] open source adblockers like ublock origin lite [...] and some other one
Yet not "every user has switched to these free products". Apparently the consumers don't feel the same way as yourself, or they are not aware of those options (marketing costs, too). Hence (quoting myself):
> A product justifies its price tag as long as people are willing to buy it at that price.
I'm not a 1Blocker user, but 1Blocker definitely doesn't have to price match anyone else if their customers are happy to pay despite there are many free options.
Having the lists freely available is only part of the battle for the end user. There are different ways of using that free data, and that takes time to develop. A good blocker can also do more than just utilize that free data as well
The free functionality works well enough for me that I never saw the need to look further (until now).
You can only enable one filter list, but "Ads" is a single filter list, so I just enabled that. Just means I can't enable the "Trackers" (though safari has some built in tracker blocking) or "Annoyances" lists, or add Custom rules.
Though, it's going to be a deal-breaker for anyone outside of the English speaking world, because the regional filters count as a second list.
Yeah Wiper 2 works really well but it slows down my iPhone 12 considerably. I guess there’s not enough ram for all these filters. Still faster than AdGuard.
Mostly using Wipr 2. Brave works very well but Safari seemed maybe slightly snappier (I know the browser engine is the same). Tried this but seems like it blocked less than Wipr 2 in a quick spot check.
gorhill has proven his integrity time and time again, and that's hard to beat. He works on uBO because he believes in it and not for profit. It's the one thing that I would value, especially in an ad blocker. This isn't to say that there's anything wrong with AdGuard though.
Yeah honestly unless the developer can demonstrate that they don't allow ads through from who pay them to be allowed, pretty much no adblocker is going to be fully trustworthy. There will always be an incentive, if the adblocker is popular enough, for the dev to take money from an advertiser to bypass the block.
If I did have to trust any adblocker though, it would be gorhill's.
uBlock is open source. Some people might object AdGuard Russian foundation, but they have distanced themselves from the conflict and employ people in Ukraine.
So I did some research into this and it’s complicated. Seems as though the founder is Russian, the business is registered in Cyprus and is under EU jurisdiction, and the team is all over the world with the majority based in Russia.
I like that I can use uBlock Origin in Orion on iOS but interacting with any addon in it feels finicky, so I keep it at a pretty minimal level (compared to how aggressively I block on desktop, anyways). Anything else is definitely welcome though so looking forward to it.
Liking AdGuard too. Both their DNS offering (basically a Pi-Hole in the cloud), and their iOS content blocker. Especially because I can subscribe to third party blocklists like HaGeZi, and AdGuard will load/transform them into Apple's custom content filtering syntax.
> Compatibility: Requires iOS 18.0 or later and visionOS 1.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and Apple Vision. Requires macOS 15.0 or later and a Mac with Apple Silicon chip.
Just build your own copy, give apple $100/year for a developer license, move to a country in the EU, and then you can "sideload" this open-source code onto your device. You also need something running macOS.
*Purchase $100/year apple certificate or move to a country in the EU.
You can sideload for free for a week or you can buy a 3rd party certificate for $20 dollars. For free you can use sidestore (anywhere, not just the EU) for free, but you need to connect to a WiFi network once a week. You can also build with github actions without a mac
Thanks for the giggle. I built a few apps back in the day, back then you could build and deploy on local device, no need to pay 100$, isn’t this still the case if you do not want to deploy on the appstore? Anyway, your comment is worthy of a xkcd.
YouTube ads are notoriously tricky to block and can’t be blocked by any DNS-level ad blocker I have tried. If you don’t use YouTube then they probably work well for you, but a lot of people do use YouTube and want those ads gone
Not everyone has mullvad, corporate VPNs can’t be run concurrently with mullvad, not all networks allow a VPN, not all sites can be accessed through a VPN like mullvad, not all countries allow VPNs, etc.
uBlock is fantastic at what it does. I'm looking forward to this. I'm currently using both Wipr 2 and AdGuard together which has worked well. AdGuard allows user defined cosmetic filters that I've come to rely on more and more in the browser, and it makes certain mobile sites so much better. Will uBlock on iOS support this?
I run only Wipr2 and am happy with it, even if its $5 vs free, I'm happy to support a dev who makes a great app. I'll try UBOL for iOS when its available.
Agreed, it blows my mind that more people aren't willing to pay $5-15 ($15 in my case of running Wipr 2 and AdGuard) to clean the web on your phone. The same people in my life who wouldn't think twice about a $15 cocktail.
Nothing wrong with either, but damn the value equation is out of wack to me, it's just so worth it.
It is deeply disappointing how poorly Apple implements privacy tools and technologies.
To wit:
It is 2025 and you cannot configure a DoH endpoint in Safari on either iOS or OSX.
Further, enabling DoH in iOS involves an experts-only plist file download which has many esoteric failure modes that are difficult to track and have poor (nonexistent ?) documentation.
Finally, any regular person (like my wife) will have an almost immediate need to toggle adblocking DNS on and off for (weird site that breaks) but, of course, that is not possible without going through the entire plist file workflow twice (once to remove (not disable) the existing profile and once to re-download it).
I might be misunderstanding your problem, but if you want to easily switch DNS there is an iOS app I was using. Sadly, don’t remember what it was called, but I’m sure an AppStore search will yield possible solutions
Now you have the extension built, and you have two options for getting it onto your device:
1. Pay $100/year for a developer license, create your own testflight for yourself and your friends, upload it, there you go
Or
2. Move to a european country to enable side-loading, pay $100/year for a developer license so you can sign it, and then sign + sideload it. (it's not really true sideloading, but if you're in the EU you can at least do it without testflight https://doesioshavesideloadingyet.com/ )
Oh, also, if you don't have a mac of some sort, you'll have to buy one. A mac mini is pretty cheap.
You can also buy an android device and install any extension on firefox-for-android for free without paying apple, or anyone, $100/year.
You don't need to do a full reinstall each week, getting another provisioning cert works.
You can run altstore on a machine on your network, or reprovision on the device itself to re-sign the app mostly automatically. The latter does use one of your account's five free app slots though.
i’m currently just using a nextdns profile after using adguard for a long time. i switched because i hoped that i would stop getting the annoying admiral modals telling me to turn off my ad blocker. do any of the these solutions trick the anti adblock solutions?
The project page newsworthy isn’t newsworthy in any obvious way on its own, though of course anyone (including OP) could post a link to it as a helpful comment. An iOS beta signup link for it is surprising news, though!
1: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/issues/5198