This update brings no major changes, but the ones it does bring are still pretty important, especially since we apparently found an iOS 17 bug as a by-product of preparing this release.
Apple, what happened to the promised 150k content-blocking rules cap in Safari?
The main attention goes to the fix of an issue on iOS 17 where filters would just update infinitely without actually updating, and, surprise, surprise, the underlying problem turned out to be on iOS’s side: using our standard Safari content blockers with 150k filtering rules all of sudden started causing a crash on iOS 17. We found out that this was happening because Safari wouldn’t accept files over a certain size anymore — even content blockers with 40-60k rules (which is 3 times below the limit) would sometimes crash, depending on the rules they contain.
As a temporary measure, we restricted the size of our JSON files and optimized main filters so that they can squeeze into this new size requirement. If a content blocker is still a little too big for Safari (the final size depends on how many and what filters are enabled by the user), we automatically cut its size so that at least part of the rules that meet the size requirement is applied. And since it’s an obvious iOS 17 bug, we already
reported it on Apple’s forum.
Read a more detailed rant about this in our
blog article on v4.5.1.
Other improvements
Also, we updated
SafariConverterLib, Scriptlets, and TSUrlFilter dependencies. In simple words, the update of these three components helps maintain high filtering quality, i.e. efficient and up-to-date performance of blocking rules. SafariConverterLib converts AdGuard filtering rules into Safari content blocking rules,
Scriptlets and
TSUrlFilter help implement the Advanced blocking feature in AdGuard for iOS.
And last but not least, two things:
DnsLibs v2.3 update improves AdGuard's DNS-over-HTTP/3 performance and stability, and we also fixed the issue where AdGuard wouldn’t open on iOS 13.x.
Changelog
Improvements
Updated TSUrlFilter, Scriptlets, and SafariConverterLib dependencies
#2228
Fixes
Allowed specifying the final CB JSON file size limit in order to make Safari accept AdGuard’s content blockers
#56
Infinite filter updates on iOS 17
#2188
Unable to open AdGuard v4.5.0 for iOS on iOS 13.x
#2194
Updated DnsLibs (DNS filtering engine) to v2.3
Improved stability and performance of DNS-over-HTTP/3
Allowed sharp comment in exact domain name rules
#196
Fixed the issue where DoH was trying to use stale connection for too long
#200
Made so that type=HTTPS requests are now filtered properly
#199
adguard.com
