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this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
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Privacy
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Ok but this isn't Chrome or Firefox, this is Safari. Hence the question.
UBO lite has fewer features, and is therefore "lighter" than the normal UBO – hence the name.
Yes but the question is why?
Can you specify? Like, lite comes from “light“. What else is there to say. I think I’ve covered pretty much every angle already.
I mean the lite version was created specifically because of Manifest V3, which iOS does not have.
However, iOS does have a ridiculous degree of sandboxing and restrictions, which sounds familiar to those who have looked into Manifest V3. An iPhone isn’t really a pocket computer any more, because there’s hardly anything you can do with it. Like, browse Xitter, have ads shoved down your throat, and pay Apple for the opportunity to suffer maximum enshittification.
If you can come up with an application so gutted that it actually runs in spite of Manifest V3 shenanigans, there’s a chance that it might also run on iOS. Turns out, UBOL does, which is really impressive considering how hostile this software environment is.
Why go through all this trouble? The people at UBO really want to block ads everywhere, even on platforms that are actively fighting against ad blocking.
It’s not named a certain way just based on the browser it’s on, it’s named to reflect the features it has. The “lite” version isn’t as flexible because it was built to work on browsers that restrict the features of the full version. Given how restrictive mobile browsers are generally, on iOS in particular, I’m surprised the developer even got the lite version working.
Safari on iOS has always had some pretty strict limits on what extensions can do. For example, content blockers don't get to run code on the pages you browse, it's more like they give the browser a list of what type of thing to block when you install and configure it, then when you're browsing, the extension isn't even doing anything, it's just the browser using the list. Obviously that's more limiting, there might be ads that are best dealt with by running a bit of code, so it makes sense that they'd consider it "lite". (The benefit of those limits is that ad blocking extensions can't run amok and kill your phone's battery since the browser's handling it by itself.)
iOS 15 (2021) introduced support for actual extensions, not just blocklists. These extensions can inject scripts on the pages you browse and multiple adblockers on iOS make use of that, including Adguard, uBO Lite and Wipr for example.
They still use the blocklist API for their regular URL blocklists, but can run scripts in addition to that. Never saw a YouTube ad on iOS ever since, for example.
There are even userscripts extensions (think Greasemonkey compatible) available. It's no problem.