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.
The mentioned bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2013888
Titled: “add a prototype…”
Description:
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.