WebKit Silently Ignores Ad Blocker Rules in Embedded Browsers, Developer Finds
A developer building Kestrel, a macOS browser based on WKWebView, discovered that browser extensions cannot actually block ads or trackers despite appearing to work correctly. Testing showed that both Manifest V2 and Manifest V3 ad blockers, including uBO Lite with six enabled rulesets, failed to block any of five tracker URLs in controlled tests. WebKit accepts the extension rulesets, reports them as compiled and active, but does not apply them to any accessible web view — and extensions have no way to detect this failure. The only confirmed working method was a WKContentRuleList compiled natively by Kestrel itself, not through extension APIs. The developer notes two unresolved possibilities: WebKit may only honour dynamically added rules rather than static manifest-declared rulesets, or Safari's extension content blocking may rely on internal plumbing unavailable to third-party embedded browsers.
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