Hot Take Firefox browser has started shipping Brave's adblock-rust engine

Parkinsond

Parkinsond

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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.

It landed in Firefox 149 via Bugzilla Bug 2013888. It’s clearly still an experiment: disabled by default, no usable UI, no filter lists, and as far as I can tell, no press coverage.

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

Mozilla is experimenting with Brave's adblock engine, here's how to turn it on.
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Parkinsond said:
I thought it is a possibility specially Waterfox (FF fork) has already implemented such an approach.
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Firefox and Waterfox are two completely independent projects. Firefox is developer by company Mozilla who owns an advertising company, and Waterfox is developed by one guy that doesn't own advertising company and can do whatever he wants. Just because one dude decided to add ad blocker in his web browser doesn't mean Mozilla will do the same; especially when that goes against their interests.

There's a reason why Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome don't come with an ad blocker; only terrible tracking protection.
 
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Marko :) said:
Firefox and Waterfox are two completely independent projects. Firefox is developer by company Mozilla who owns an advertising company, and Waterfox is developed by one guy that doesn't own advertising company and can do whatever he wants. Just because one dude decided to add ad blocker in his web browser doesn't mean Mozilla will do the same; especially when that goes against their interests.

There's a reason why Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome don't come with an ad blocker; only terrible tracking protection.
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Well Brave offers an alternative advertising scheme (with supporting ad services), why would not Firefox which also owns an advertising company do the same?

See LEO's answer on advertising revenue. Firefox (Mozilla) is sort of copying Brave's approach (Block ads from others :-) )
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LinuxFan58 said:
Well Brave offers an alternative advertising scheme (with supporting ad services), why would not Firefox which also owns an advertising company do the same?

See LEO's answer on advertising revenue. Firefox (Mozilla) is sort of copying Brave's approach (Block ads from others :-) )
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Wasn't Brave in the controversy where they replaced original website ads with their own, collecting money without giving it to the website owner?

If I remember correctly, they were also using popular YouTubers to promote themselves without their permission as well.

Not kind of advertising scheme one should really look up to.
Sampei.Nihira said:
Chrome has a super-basic ad-blocker:

Code: 
chrome://settings/content/ads

;)
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Parkinsond said:
Almsot all of chromium browsers; even Yandex has.
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There is ad blocker in Chrome and it blocks annoying pop-up ads (not very much of them though). Google is part of some coallition for fair advertising and made Chromium block all ads that don't follow their advertising practices.

Ad blocker that isn't really an ad blocker.
 
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Marko :) said:
I did stumble upon blocked ads back when I used Chrome. It's mostly on piracy sites with a lot of ads. These sites can't use any legit advertising services so they have to rely on those shady ones.
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For piracy sites, uBOL is mandatory; even Brave shield and Ghostery cannot stop popup windows with ads; could be stopped in Brave by enabliing blocking scripts, but most probably will break the site.
 
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Parkinsond said:
For piracy sites, uBOL is mandatory; even Brave shield and Ghostery cannot stop popup windows with ads; could be stopped in Brave by enabliing blocking scripts, but most probably will break the site.
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Are you sure about that? Brave Shields' default lists are extensive and include uBO filters. Did you try setting it to "aggressive"?
 
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Rust software that can promote privacy is right up Mozilla's alley. They've been migrating critical components to Rust for a while now. We can only speculate as to how far they'll take the feature, but people love a high-performance content filter.

The Bugzilla issue for this particular enhancement is already closed—it's added and done. It's filed under the categories:
Product: Core Component: Privacy: Anti-Tracking
 
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Miravi said:
Are you sure about that? Brave Shields' default lists are extensive and include uBO filters. Did you try setting it to "aggressive"?
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Yes, fails on aggressive with all default lists on plus thee extra lists for cookies, annyonances, and experimental.
Even adding hagezi ultimate did not help.
 
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