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.

  • Ludicrous0251@piefed.zipEnglish
    17·
    21 days ago

    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.

    • XLE@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      12·
      21 days ago

      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.

    • jello@programming.dev
      6·
      21 days ago

      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

    • Vincent@feddit.nl
      4·
      21 days ago

      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.