https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust
but you will only have it built-in in Brave currently.
- Brave uses Chromium and uses better isolation and sandbox than Firefox. Especially on Android.
- Brave has Adblock built-in natively. It's written in Rust, so Manifest v3 will not affect it. https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust
- Brave is profitable on itself and not dependent on search engines money like Firefox.
Not saying it's the best but I decided against Firefox because the technical and financial foundation looks better on Brave for me.
https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust
I'm pretty sure it's also faster than any adblock extension like uBlock.
Especially on mobile Brave is a game changer.
> Brave's adblocker is uBlock origin
It's not[1].
> Brave Today can't be disabled
Currently called "Brave News" if you're looking for it. And of course it actually can be disabled[2].
> Rewards is used to track you
A request being made to a URL does not mean you are being "tracked". Brave ads are the most privacy-preserving ad architecture[3] I know about, and they are the only people trying to make a better funding model for the web that still has a lot of the upsides of ad-driven content (mainly that it is not a regressive funding model). FF is worse in this regard because Mozilla gets most of their revenue from adtech giants that clearly don't give a flying fuck about your privacy. If you think Mozilla's funding model isn't a conflict of interest and makes the web more privacy-conscious, I have a bridge to sell you.
> Telemetry automatically violates your privacy
Not really? Of course, someone very concerned with privacy should opt out of telemetry, and Brave lets you do that.
> Auto-updates violate privacy
How so? As I point out later, the most likely result of auto-updates is that they help preserve your privacy by getting bugs patched faster.
> Affiliate codes
Yes, Brave had pre-programmed history items that were affiliate links to a crypto exchange. This harmed nobody in any way and the backlash was over-the-top. But they disabled in response to user feedback. I kinda liked this idea, as it is another way Brave was trying to fund themselves without being beholden to the Googlopoly which is an endeavor I very much support (with the caveat that it can't hurt users, which again this did not).
> Uphold doesn't care about your privacy
Uphold is a financial institution based in the US (as Brave is) which by necessity needs to comply with KYC/AML regulations. That means they need to collect your personal info. Take it up with the US government if you're unhappy.
> Tor tabs leaking DNS
Was fixed fairly quickly[4] and I think worth pointing out that no other browser even bothers trying to do something like this (integrating Tor for better privacy). Conveniently left out of the part where the author made the claim that "Brave isn't better for privacy than FF because it's just uBlock origin". Clearly brave is trying things that are not just adblocking to increase user privacy.
In general with this point, kinda funny that apparently the author of this article wants Brave to be the only software engineering org in existence that never has bugs. I guess if that's your stance though it makes sense that you wouldn't want auto-updates. For everyone else that lives in reality, auto-updates are a good thing for security (and therefore privacy, as made clear here when a privacy-related bug inevitably happens).
> Chromium and Google’s monopoly
Yeahhhhh, using FF isn't the silver bullet you think it is, as again, Mozilla gets the vast majority of their revenue from being paid by Google. What happens if that dries up? Seems unlikely that maintaining Blink without Mozilla will be easier than Brave maintaining a privacy-centric fork of Chromium (which will presumably continue to get not-privacy-related upstream improvements from Google/Microsoft/etc in perpetuity).
> brave-core-ext.s3.brave.com fetches 5 extensions and installs them. It is said that this might be a backdoor. But I don’t want to get conspiracist. I prefer giving you verifiable facts. I’ll limit myself to inform you about suspicious activities.
This is worse than all the Bitcoin maximalists / shitcoin pump-and-dumpers with their "this is not financial advice" shtick. We know what you're doing, it's pretty transparent. Especially when you do it twice:
> They were also accused of theft with BAT but this isn’t verifiable so I’ll only link the source for you.
In summary, I disagree with basically all of this article, significant parts of which are just factually wrong.
[1] https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust
[2] https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360056341952-How...
This does not appear to be true. Here is the github repo for their open source adblock engine written in rust:
https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust
Here is a (somewhat dated) article describing it by the authors:
https://brave.com/improved-ad-blocker-performance/
> Google will take decisions that benefit their advertisement business, like making impossible to use adblockers on any Chromium based browser.
Because the brave adblocker is integrated directly into the browser (ie. not an extension) the Manifest V3 limitations don't apply.
https://brave.com/improved-ad-blocker-performance/
https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust
Using Chrome+uBO+uMatrix and Brave side by side, Brave just works better. Less knobs to fiddle with, sane defaults. Sure I love the power of uMatrix, but it comes with its own time sink managing it. Brave, out of the box, performs correctly in most situations, and switching from default to blocking all cookies, javascript, and fingerprinting is only a click each (and thats the advanced mode.)
They rewrote ublock origin in rust, and its native to the product, not tacked on. Shady business model aside, they are making technical contributions to the world.
I think that such sites would be in ballpark of a few ‰. That would enable me to offer the contentless index for download. With delta updates and torrent for distribution it could be not that expensive, but that's a thing that I could charge for.
My intention is to use AdBlock rules like easylist to check whether or not indeed the page.
My initial code is fine in Go, but I lost enthusiasm for Go lately and careerwise it's not a good fit for me (I don't have much time to learn something not as useful for me professionally). So I started to rewrite it in Rust, while learning it, you can laugh now (Rust Evangelism Strike Force el oh el). It has an advantage with ready to use rules parser from Brave [2] and presumably high quality tokenizer from html5ever [3].
I want to use a tokenizer instead of a full parser to be able to do stream processing bringing costs down.
Common Crawl data lays on S3 so the processing must be done initially on EC2 to keep it low cost.
[0] Current Go code: https://github.com/hadrianw/abracabra
[2] https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust
[3] https://docs.rs/html5ever/0.25.1/html5ever/tokenizer/index.h...
EDIT:
Also for the search part I want to use something more stand alone than Elasticsearch to offer desktop search with downloaded index. When I started with Go I wanted to use Bleve [4], now I'm not sure, but I think that Bleve is getting mature enough. I will worry when I will have some data to search through.
One of the challenges with this whole enterprise is a small need of JavaScript parsing. There is a common pattern, that for example Google Analytics uses, that uses a snippet of JavaScript to insert a proper script tag. But those snippets are very short so I think they may not need a full JS VM, maybe even a tokenizer would be good enough. Browser AdBlockers base on the site executing JavaScript already.
I know brave isnt the most popular product / business model, but their rust reimplementation of the Adblock Plus syntax, a rewrite of uBlock Origins and Cliqz, might hopefully be a valuable contribution to the open source world.
Regardless of how people feel about the ethics of ad blocking, being able to dynamically block parts of websites has become as or more important than anti-virus, for safety.
https://brave.com/improved-ad-blocker-performance/
https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust
Although it will make troubleshooting a nightmare, necessary protection at multiple levels of the stack is becoming a reality. NextDNS (or quad9, pihole, adguard) combined with Brave (or uBlock Origin, Cliqz) in combination are going to keep people safer, despite the shortcomings of both dns based and active page filters and parsing.
It would be nice to be able to manage and maintain filter list configurations across all browsers, devices, and dns. Some sort of central management that updates and propagates NextDNS, Brave, uBlock Origin, uBlock Matrix, and Dark Reader. uBlock Matrix and Dark Reader are especially cumbersome to use between Chrome and Firefox on different devices.
https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust
Here is an excerpt of the read.me:
It uses a tokenisation approach for quickly reducing the potentially matching rule search space against a URL.
The algorithm is inspired by, and closely follows the algorithm of uBlock Origin and Cliqz.
https://github.com/brave/brave-core/search?q=rust https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust-ffi https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust