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.
Anyone know how this compares, performance and security wise, to uBlock?
Is this a step towards implementing Google’s same extension restrictions in FF, setting themselves up as the primary arbiter of adblock tools?
In today’s day and age adblocking feels like a core function of a browser, but also why replace something that works perfectly well with extensions?
Mixed feelings on this one.
It’s probably faster than using an extension, especially if we’re talking about the mobile version of Firefox, which is still very unoptimized compared to Chrome-based browsers.
I don’t know about this specifically, but Rust in general is fast and at least memory safe (which helps with general security but doesn’t guarantee it at by any means).
I also used Brave for quite a while and anecdotally it was quite fast. So in my personal experience the performance is good.
I don’t see it as a step towards bring google-like, personally. But who knows with FF these days
Is this a step towards implementing Google’s same extension restrictions in FF, setting themselves up as the primary arbiter of adblock tools?
I wouldn’t expect that:
Firefox, however, will continue supporting both blockingWebRequest and declarativeNetRequest — giving developers more flexibility and keeping powerful privacy tools available to users
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/firefox-manifest-v3-adblockers/
and
And even if we re-evaluate this decision at some point down the road, we anticipate providing a notice of at least 12 months for developers to adjust accordingly and not feel rushed.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2024/03/13/manifest-v3-manifest-v2-march-2024-update/
So even if that would change (which I’d be very surprised by), it wouldn’t happen for another twelve months, so plenty of time for outrage then.
Can we really trust mozilla to be in charge of adblocking? It’s not like users have any power over firefox’s source code if mozilla decides that google ads are okay, for instance. I think it would be a bad idea to prematurely kill ublock origin and assume we’ll never need a community-supported adblocker again.
Haha, I don’t think anyone’s talking about killing uBO, and I’m fairly sure gorhill wouldn’t do that, unless he grew tired of maintaining it.
(They could remove the APIs it uses, like Chromium did to some extent, but Mozilla has publicly committed to not doing that.)
Can we really trust mozilla to be in charge of adblocking? It’s not like users have any power over firefox’s source code if mozilla decides that google ads are okay, for instance.
Just add custom filter lists. Never understood the outcry back when people used AdGuard and an optional whitelist was on by default.
If you can install a 3rd party web browser, you can change filter rules as well.
A built-in ad blocker is better. Hopely Mozilla doesn’t do something stupid with it.
I’m mostly worried they’ll underutilize it! That would be unfortunate, but it would still be an improvement.
Well, unlike Brave, Firefox needs to not break legitimate webpages. If a webdev wants to support Firefox and it just doesn’t display a (non-ad) element they’ve added, then they might not bother supporting Firefox after all.
I disagree. It might change nothing for us on Lemmy already using plenty of extensions but it changes things for millions and it will hit Google very hard
Hmm, they’ve had their tracking protection built-in for quite a while, which happens to block lots of ads, because most ads contain trackers. I haven’t tested with uBlock Origin in a while, though. Do webpages now display non-tracking ads for Firefox?
Otherwise, this seems like a mere technological change with little user impact, which they rightfully didn’t make much of a buzz about…
The mentioned bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2013888
Titled: “add a prototype…”
Description:
This’ll be pref-controlled and disabled by default, but will enable some fun playing around, foxfooding, and further development.
So doesn’t sound like it’s “landing” in the sense that your Firefox instance will actually be running this (yet), I think? Though maybe the prototyping was successful.
The code has shipped; it is dormant, but can optionally be activated (instructions are in the article, under the “How to enable Brave’s adblocking engine in Firefox” subheading)
Right, so for the vast majority of users, their Firefox instances won’t actually be running this, right?
Right. It’s nice to know it’s there though, so Waterfox’s decision to implement the Brave engine was done with insight from how Firefox itself is implementing it.
Interesting it’s there, though. And that it “just works” like a super light version of uBlock Origin. I wonder what they’ll do with it. Mozilla is tolerant with ad blocking (but IMO never wants to support it first-party), but they do have several “tracker blockers” they’ve been independently maintaining for years with similar methods…
Oh yeah I wasn’t trying to say this wasn’t interesting, just trying to make sure people didn’t get the wrong idea of what it meant.
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