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by cgb223 1859 days ago
Has anyone used iOS browsers with adblocking built in?

How do Firefox and Brave compare to Adguard or 1BlockerX?

Any other browsers out there that do a better job?

2 comments

All those browsers have to use Safari (WKWebView) internally so they are close.

There’s an important difference, these browsers can also run additional JS on web pages and partly compensate for missing content blocking capabilities. This could help to an extent, but I am not sure if the said browsers do that.

Brave on iOS does inject JS into YouTube and other sites. It uses exactly the same `+js(...)` injections as Brave on desktop and Android, as well as uBlock Origin, which is really helpful.

Unfortunately, JS can't solve everything... the WKWebView restrictions are definitely a huge frustration. Brave for Android and desktop both build from a single codebase, but everything has to be reimplemented to work on iOS too.

I’ve been trying Brave this week and unfortunately it performed absolutely uselessly on some busy websites, locking up for *several seconds* every time I open a new tab. It might be a temporary bug, but I moved to DDG as my secondary browser anyway. Safari and DDG handle those same pages effortlessly.
Which sites are causing issues?
I don’t remember which one exactly but Brave lags a lot if you open a video, scroll down, and open another video, in quick succession. It starts locking up for half a second or more once you reach the tenth video on YouTube. This is an iPhone 11 Pro, the whole UI stops being responsive