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On any webpage with ads that are often within the body of text, the Orion content filtering tools presently available, whilst they block the ad, do not provide cosmetic filtering. As such, much white space is present on pages, blank banner ads at the bottom, etc. on many sites that use them.

Easy examples would be RollingStone, The Sun, and many other less than great sites, but they are littered with ads and represent the issue reliably.

Are there plans to bring reliable cosmetic filtering to Orion for iOS? Below are some examples:

I would hope for a cleaner looking web experience. Something like this can be achieved on Safari for iOS using the AdGuard extensions, the same pages are shown below:

1.3.18 (6)

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  • sarno replied to this.

  • @Prototype317 cosmetic filtering of orion content blocker does work here's what i see:

    I'm using easylist, easyprivacy, fanboy's annoyance and privacy essential.

    @sarno probably in your setup what is working is Orion's content blocker and not uBo, even on desktop to make uBo work you need to disable Orion's cb. Try to switch Orion's cb to "base", you'll see that uBo sometimes works but more often does not. You can load uBo filters in Orion's cb, I'm actually using "badware risks" from uBo on it

    Prototype317 Solid suggestion for an improvement; upvoted!

    FWIW, uBlock Origin on iOS does a vastly better job here than Orion's built-in filters. Would recommend.

        sarno I have not found Ublock Origin as functional on my device. The extension loads, the settings can be configured, however if you disable Kagi’s ad blocking as much as possible and visit a site where an ad gets through, a filter enabled in Ublock Origin that should catch it does not.

        Therefore, I’d like to see the user experience enhanced such that cosmetic filtering works built-in.

            Prototype317 Oh, that's strange.

            Here's my setup;

            • Orion's built-in Content Blockers are set to "Full"
            • The Firefox version of uBlock Origin is installed
            • The Firefox version of Privacy Badger is installed

            This is what that website looks like for me;

                sarno can you please show your UBlock Origin Extension Window and show the count of ads blocked on that page? For context, I mean this:

                Further, it looks like you’re requesting the desktop version of the site?

                    sarno on the sun alone you should have blocked tens, maybe hundreds of scripts. Since install it claims to have blocked 8. Are you sure it’s working?

                    Also, Privacy Badger is made redundant by uBo and they are not recommended to be installed together by the uBo dev (but that’s a separate issue).

                        @Prototype317 cosmetic filtering of orion content blocker does work here's what i see:

                        I'm using easylist, easyprivacy, fanboy's annoyance and privacy essential.

                        @sarno probably in your setup what is working is Orion's content blocker and not uBo, even on desktop to make uBo work you need to disable Orion's cb. Try to switch Orion's cb to "base", you'll see that uBo sometimes works but more often does not. You can load uBo filters in Orion's cb, I'm actually using "badware risks" from uBo on it

                        chorizo interesting - enabling that combination specifically fixed my cosmetic filtering issues. Beforehand the filters didn’t work…

                            Prototype317 probably what made it work is that adding custom filters you update all enambled filters, Orion's cb doesn't auto update filters so you have to do it manually, I suggest to do it once a day and everytime filtering seem to fail

                                Prototype317 on the sun alone you should have blocked tens, maybe hundreds of scripts. Since install it claims to have blocked 8. Are you sure it’s working?

                                The Sun was the first website I went to since uninstalling the App Store version of Orion and installing the TestFlight version, so it having a near-zero number of lifetime blocks does make sense.

                                Prototype317 Also, Privacy Badger is made redundant by uBo and they are not recommended to be installed together by the uBo dev (but that’s a separate issue).

                                If your priority is to combat tracking / fingerprinting as much as possible, sure.

                                If your priority is blocking the largest possible number of annoyances with the least tweaking, PB helps.

                                It's a similar conversation to using both DNS-level & browser extension ad blockers. The result is a less common combination of scripts being blocked, but fewer ads getting through. For some people that's a disaster and not at all worth it; for others, it's a demonstrable improvement with a trade-off they're prepared to accept.

                                I'm sure it's possible to fully reproduce PB's behaviour in uBO. It's not done by default, and tbh I cba.

                                      Prototype317

                                      chorizo

                                      Previously I had disabled EasyList as it should be duplicated by the AdGuard list - apparently the cosmetic filters perhaps not.

                                      I feel a bit of a fool now. Not a bug, just a stupid user…

                                            Prototype317 ah yes, AdGuard's filterlist worked for months just fine until last update... I don't know what's going on but since last update Adguard specific filters aren't applied from Orion's cb even if you see the rule count as loaded, there ate two bug reports for this, I'll link them in the next comment so if you want you can upvote

                                            edit:
                                            you're not fool, there was even a brief period when the AdGuard filters replaced easylists...

                                                We had to remove the AdGuard lists due to copyright reasons. In the meantime, we are focusing on optimizing uBlock compatibility as much as possible while we work on finding an integrated solution.

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