Full article: Firefox browser has started shipping Brave's adblock-rust engine

After seeing a lot of backlash over Waterfox adding Brave's adblock engine:

It looks like Waterfox is piggy-backing off of Firefox’s implementation (great!).

And it's been there for a little while.

Mozilla bundled adblock-rust (Brave’s Rust-based adblock engine, the same one my team works on) into Firefox. Pretty exciting to see them finally start taking ad & tracker blocking seriously; I didn’t think I’d see this day. It landed in Firefox 149 via via Bugzilla Bug 2013888.

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[–] 29 points 4 months ago* (9 children)

What's the difference with ublock and why not contact ublock developer to propose to integrate it instead of what did Brave? Article don't mention what is better with adblock rust! :-/

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  • [–] 10 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    Because Rust is cool and JavaScript sucks

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Yeah as much as I love ublock origin and use it heavily. I support more rust on more things. 60+% of browser CVE are memory issues. Rust was explicitly made to stop those.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Do you think that Javascript has manual memory management?

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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    No, but it's nowhere near as strict in its management. Plenty of memory issues can still usually from unintentionally maintaining a reference to an object. forgotten global variables, uncleared timers (setInterval), or closures that stay in scope longer than necessary.

    And ofc you now have the performance overhead of GC constantly running

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago

    Probably for the same reason that Waterfox developers gave: Because uBO is GPL licensed and combining with an MPL licensed codebase makes things complicated for downstream developers who cannot GPL license their codebase.

    The Brave module is MPL licensed already.

    Sure, I would prefer that everything is GPL, but it's not my project.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Ublock is way better than that brave crap. As long as they don't start moving towards Manifest 3.0 "because we have builtin adblock now" :( I wouldn't put it past Mozilla because they've really been cozying up to the ad industry. With anonym, the "privacy-preserving attribution" BS, stuff like that.

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago

    I wonder how they actually implement it, given that the corporation runs an advertising network.

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