Safari-specific filter issues: Please report troubleshooting information

[gorhill]

This is a new thread to report troubleshooting information for those facing filtering issues.

No need to post screenshots until requested by volunteers here. However troubleshooting information is required.

When facing filtering issues such as lack of expected filtering, please do the following:

• Visit a webpage where you suffer filtering issues
• Share the URL of that webpage here, wrap URL in backticks ` to prevent live links
• Click the chat icon in the popup panel
• Expand "Troubleshooting information" at the bottom
• Copy/paste content here, wrapped around three backticks ``` lines (for proper code block rendering)

Thank you.

[sol1tary]

Hello 🙂 thank you very much for your work!

I have a little problem on a website macrumours.com. The ads are blocked but it leaves an empty space.

name: uBlock Origin Lite
version: 2025.529.1838
browser: Safari Mobile 604 (ios)
filtering:
 site: complete
 default: basic
rulesets:
 urlhaus-full
 ublock-filters
 rus-0
 fra-0
 ublock-badware
 pgl
 easylist
 easyprivacy
 adguard-mobile
registerContentScripts:

[gorhill]

registerContentScripts:

Unfortunately, it seems to be a registerContentScripts malfunction, and removing/reinstalling the extension is only what might work.

[sol1tary]

registerContentScripts:

Unfortunately, it seems to be a registerContentScripts malfunction, and removing/reinstalling the extension is only what might work.

Unfortunately, reinstalling didn't help, it's not a big issue though. Thanks!

[gorhill]

it's not a big issue though

It is though, registerContentScripts takes care of 50% of proper content blocking in uBOL, it's more than just cosmetic filtering -- it's a major malfunction making the extension unsuitable for distribution as a proper extension.

---

Now regarding the unsupported requestDomains issue, I am entertaining applying the fix in uBO while waiting for the fix in Safari stable. This is another major malfunction which could be mitigated meanwhile. The worry is about DNR rule counts, since each entry in requestDomains will have to be spin off as a single DNR rule -- we are talking about tens of thousands of extra DNR rules being created as a result.

[stephenhawk8054]

The worry is about DNR rule counts, since each entry in requestDomains will have to be spin off as a single DNR rule

Is this from Safari's official fix or from the workaround?

[gorhill]

Looks like in Safari there is a 150K "content blocking" rules limit. Their declarativeNetRequest implementation translates DNR rules into internal "content blocking" rules, so it looks like this might be an issue whether the fix is on my side or their side. Ideally, in the future they would extend their "content blocking" rule syntax to support the equivalent of DNR's requestDomains. They already have code for if-domain to match against an array of domains, which is essentially what requestDomains does.

[gorhill]

Unfortunately, reinstalling didn't help, it's not a big issue though. Thanks!

Did you quit Safari after removing the extension? I suffered the malfunction in the past on an iPad, at which time I removed the extension. Eventually I re-installed it after a while and registerContentScripts worked as expected.

[vitorgalvao]

Looks like in Safari there is a 150K "content blocking" rules limit.

Indeed. What other adblocking extensions do is essentially bundle multiple content blockers inside one single extension. So from the user’s perspective they still only install one thing from the App Store, but then in the Safari Preferences they have multiple content blockers to enable.

1Blocker, for example, takes the opportunity of that limitation to organise the rules in categories.

Screenshot

Note only the last six are content blockers. The first two are separate (but related) functionality. Yet all of those show up when installing the 1Blocker app.

Wipr, as another example, doesn’t categorise and just numbers the blocklists.

Screenshot

The first four are content blockers, the Extra is a special one which needs extra permissions and can do more aggressive blocking (e.g. using JavaScript) which the other blockers cannot do.

[sol1tary]

Unfortunately, reinstalling didn't help, it's not a big issue though. Thanks!

Did you quit Safari after removing the extension? I suffered the malfunction in the past on an iPad, at which time I removed the extension. Eventually I re-installed it after a while and registerContentScripts worked as expected.

Yeah, it's still the same. Do I need to do a "full" reinstall? Because after reinstalling, all my filters and settings just come back automatically

[gorhill]

Do I need to do a "full" reinstall?

I would say yes because I suspect there is storage corruption related to registerContentScripts, but I wouldn't know how to force all the extension data to be completely removed.

[MineGene]

@sol1tary @gorhill

Have either of you found a way to fully reset the app back to defaults, clearing all extension data successfully?

I've tried various times to do this, but it hasn't worked, including:

• uninstalling app
• turning off iCloud Safari sync
• clearing Safari data
• clearing iCloud Safari data
• rebooting

I can't think of any additional places the extension data would be kept to be able to reset the app.