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Firefox browser has started shipping Brave's adblock-rust engine
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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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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.)
I’m a bit late to answer but I certainly don’t trust them after all the crap they created.
In the end, the developer of uBlock Origin may be bored, stop developing, and we’ll have to rely on Mozilla while losing all the knowledge that uBlock Origin brought. It’s always bad in a professional environment, it will be bad for any open-source project.
woelkchenCan 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.
Hal-5700XA 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.
ElectricVocalistI 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
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, correct?
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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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! :-/
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.
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.
Agreed, uBo is the superior solution since it is not only an ad blocker. It is so much more.
Firefox already supports Manifest V3. It’s just that they retained critical V2 APIs required for adblocking in V3 too.
Because Rust is cool and JavaScript sucks
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.
Do you think that Javascript has manual memory management?
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
Well yeah but a lot of actual overflows need to be fixed by making the JS runtime/JIT in Rust. Not in JS itself.
And rust doesn’t protect you from bad coding. Just like JS.
I wonder how they actually implement it, given that the corporation runs an advertising network.