Ghostery stops working unless re-enabled on Edge iOS

[yashlakhtariya]

On Edge iOS, Ghostery is finally provided but some problem is there with Edge Extensions or Ghostery itself :

After clearing data and browsing history of any time period, ghostery stops working and unless it is disabled and enabled again it doesn’t work

Using latest Edge iOS version

Similar thing happens in Safari sometimes also

[seia-soto]

Hi @yashlakhtariya ,

We're sorry for the inconvenience and we also hope to improve the experience with Microsoft Edge.

I tried to reproduce it using iOS 26.0 (23A341) and MS Edge 140.0.3485.71 using Ghostery v10.5.10. I believe it maybe a site-specific problem with our extension. Please, provide a website URL that the issue occurs and the exact versions because I cannot confirm if the latest means 26 or 18 yet (I believe automatic update is not fully rolled out as well).

Even if you specify that the issue happens on any URL, please put the URL you tried to test our extension. It helps us to reproduce the issue a lot easier.

I tried to reproduce the leftovers from ghostery/broken-page-reports#1723 but failed to do so.

Best

[seia-soto]

It'd be also nice to put the up-to-date testing results since the issue is created 4 days ago.

[seia-soto]

If you're not sure which information would it be helpful, you may also consider https://github.com/ghostery/broken-page-reports/issues/new?template=general.yml for creating a new issue. I will escalate to ghostery-extension side whenever I can confirm the issue is happening across all websites. Thanks for the contribution!

[yashlakhtariya]

This happens in Edge iOS while visiting any website, it stops blocking ads after Clear Data option is used in Edge either for an hour or all time

For example, you can reproduce the issue with this website : https://adblock-tester.com/

b7e2b372-fc0f-45eb-b039-8e96231593e8.mov

Please check this screen recording, ignore the score of 62, some part is blocked because of my system wide DNS

When Ghostery is working properly it blocks all ads possible, with the score of 99

Exact versions :
iOS 26 23A340
Edge 140.0.3485.71

[chrmod]

Many thanks for detailed screen recording. It is very useful! We've forwarded your report to Edge mobile team, lets hope we can fix it fast!

[yashlakhtariya]

Thanks for the fast response and action! Appreciate the work of Ghostery team!

Let's hope it gets fixed soon!

[chrmod]

Edge team pointed out that Clearing Data removes also extension storage. Thanks to that I was able to reproduce the problem - it looks like issue with indexeddb.

[yashlakhtariya]

Similar thing happens in Safari too, sometimes clearing data stops Ghostery from working, but it is Safari DNR implementation problem which only Apple can fix, the issue is for all MV3 extensions like uBlock Origin Lite, on whose github issues, it is mentioned that this issue occurs and sometimes it occurs switching to private windows also, as reported by users.

MV3 is the future and Google has compulsorily implemented it, but so many bugs are there, these Chromium, Webkit based browser developers should really work with you guys and cooperate to make MV3 stable for ad blockers as modern users care about ad and tracking prevention.

At least for Edge iOS, there is more probability to fix this issue as the Edge Mobile team is cooperating.

Thanks for reaching out to them and raising the issue there!

Please update this thread whenever they give any updates.

[yashlakhtariya]

Hello @chrmod!

Can you please tell if there are any updates from Edge Mobile team?

[chrmod]

Hi @yashlakhtariya - It looks like we should be able to handle this (quite unexpected) situation on the extension side. Let us try in next day. Will update this issue as we have have progress.

[yashlakhtariya]

Great @chrmod! Thanks for the reply. The only thing preventing me from switching from Safari to Edge on iOS is this bug

It works awesome on Safari, as soon as this bug is fixed, I can switch to Edge for syncing with other OSes

Edit: I recently found out that by just opening ghostery settings after clearing data, re-enabling any of options for blocking like ad, consent, tracking also triggers filter rules updates and it works after a few seconds delay

So maybe you can figure out to do it automatically after clearing browsing data

Just informed if it may help, also can you let me know the specific part of code for this where I can contribute if possible

[smalluban]

We can confirm that we have successfully reproduced the issue. We figured out that the problem is with clearing DNR rules by the browser (which is responsible for blocking network requests). The browser should not clear them, or it should at least restart them. This feature is fully static and it does not depend on any runtime code. This is a browser bug, which we will report to the Edge team (and eventually to Apple).

The DNR rules are restarted if you perform one of the following actions:

• Hard restart of the application (swipe up on the app drawer)
• Pause and unpause Ghostery on any website
• Turn off and turn on the extension

As the third action requires the most clicks, we suggest restarting the browser after clearing browser data. As the bug is not on the extension side, refreshing filters, waiting for the background process to restart, etc, won't help. It must be an action that triggers reloading DNR rules.

[yashlakhtariya]

That's what I thought because the same issue occurs with uBOL also

Hope Edge team fixes the issue soon