> iPhone users are using Manifest V3 _every single day_ in their Safari. There was never another option for them.

This is false. Safari supports Manifest V2 and has no plans to deprecate it.

I'd guess that you're confused because Safari lacks support for webRequest BlockingResponse: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

Whatever it's called, it has all the downsides of Manifest V3 that are being criticized for Google.

Just slapping another name on it doesn't make the issues go away.

> it has all the downsides of Manifest V3

This is not true either. There are many different aspects to Manifest V3, such as restrictions on script execution.

I care, and I've basically stopped using my iphone for anything because the web is an abysmal experience full of ads even with the maximum amount of ad blocking possible on iOS. I hate the iPhone and the only reason I haven't switched back to android is that it seems to manage to, somehow, still be even worse. We are well and truly on the other side of the enshitification event horizon on mobile, and it looks like Google is doing it's best to make sure the web keeps up on the desktop too.

Android has F-Droid, including Fennec F-Droid (Firefox for Android), which is the only tolerable mobile browser, imo.

Not trying to get you back on your iPhone but I can tell you that 1Blocker + NextDNS do wonders when it comes to blocking ads on the web using iphones. Granted, sometimes some sites do break for weird reasons but i'm happy to live with that if it means I get to avoid ads. Hell, it even manages to block ads on mobile youtube.

My personal experience with ad blocking on iOS is that it’s both far less effective overall than ublock origin, and still manages to break a lot more sites. I have 0 tolerance for ads though- so even a 99% success rate on a site is unacceptable to me and I’ll just not use that site on my phone. Maybe 2/3rds of sites fail by that criteria for me. If ublock origin on my desktop computer also fails, then I don’t use the site at all- but that’s a vanishingly rate occurrence.

You could use Brave or Orion and get adblocking on iOS

Until Apple allows other browser engines, everything is still limited to the same set of blockers you can get in safari. None of them are remotely good enough compared to ublock origin. My current phone probably has around 6-12 months of life left in it, and if Apple doesn’t have a solution by then I’m dropping the iPhone and either going with a de-Googled android build or giving up on smart phones altogether.

Or Firefox Focus, which is what I use. It does a pretty good job.

Those are all using the same browser engine with the same limitations that ManifestV3 is bringing to Chrome. You're using it.