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Brave Improves Its Ad-Blocker Performance with New Engine in Rust

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Re: Brave Improves Its Ad-Blocker Performance with New Engine in Rust

#201
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just use Firefox with uBlock Origin on all my devices. Better blocking than Brave and no concerns about future monetization.

I'm currently using Firefox on all devices as my primary browser, but there is a single feature that I've gotten used to in Chrom* browsers on mobile - 'pull down to refresh' - that looks indispensable to me, and I'm planning to move to Brave on mobile just because of that (already replaced Chrome with Brave on Desktop as my secondary browser). Yes, there are add-ons to do that on mobile too, but they are all inconsi…

Also scrolling is useless on Firefox mobile.

Re: Brave Improves Its Ad-Blocker Performance with New Engine in Rust

#202

It's interesting to see block list creators more or less reinventing all the tricks that network-security regex implementation people invented 10-20 years ago. One wonders whether they might do better picking up an off-the-shelf regex implementation (e.g. our own Hyperscan, or for those who must must must have something in Rust, the engine from ripgrep, which I believe is just called "regex" :-) ).

As far as I know the « regex » crate is used in some places. But interpreting block rules has a lot to do with specific options and behaviors which are pretty tailored to the task and it would not be easy to use off the shelf regex implementations for this. Although I myself looked at Hyperscan in the past for the purpose of blocking ads (the performance looks amazing!).

Re: Brave Improves Its Ad-Blocker Performance with New Engine in Rust

#203
post #95
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See https://brave.com/faq/#unclaimed-funds for a description of their current and past policy. Currently: "If a publisher has not verified ownership, then a user’s contributions will be held in reserve inside the browser for 90 days. The browser routinely updates an internal list of all verified publishers to determine whether a property can receive contributions. At the end of the 90 day period, any contributions ma…

That's still terrible. If I'm a Youtube content creator who doesn't want anything to do with Brave, they're still going to remove the ads that I want on my videos to monetize my content, and hold any of the BAT that Brave users contribute to me hostage.

When file sharing first came along it was pretty clear that the status quo of dropping $20 on a CD for some music was not going to last. Regardless the music industry refused to accept this and fought tooth and nail to try to keep CDs as the norm instead of adopting to changing times. Unsurprisingly that's a battle they eventually lost.

A decade or so ago ad-blocking was extremely esoteric. Today it's reaching a majority on all devices excluding mobile. Though mobile will also likely follow a similar esoteric->majority trajectory. In any case it should be clear that the status quo of advertisements isn't going to last. Google trying to break ad-blocking in Chrome feels very much analogous to the old dinosaurs in the music industry trying to cling onto CDs. Users hate unsolicited ads and, in the end, it's a losing battle to try to force everybody to keep watching them.

The point of this is that that money you're being offered is money that would not exist otherwise. These people are not going to watch your ads, period. You're free to take it, and you're free to not take it - it'll eventually be returned to the people that wanted to give it to you. But complaining about it's very existence is peculiar. It's like if you only accept PayPal and I said I don't use PayPal but I'd be happy to send you money through e.g. Stripe. If you don't want to setup a Stripe account to accept my money then that's completely your choice, but to complain about it just seems petulant.

Re: Brave Improves Its Ad-Blocker Performance with New Engine in Rust

#205

I'm impressed with Brave. I've started using it as my primary browser (after a couple false starts a year or so ago) and it has all the best of Chrome without the worst. There is controversy about how Brave does stuff, and I agree there is some sketchy stuff they are doing (replacing ads with their own). I'm glad they are giving us a choice, though, and exploring different options for sites being able to makes some m…

As soon as an ad-blocker starts trying to monetize with ads, it's like the death knell.

Re: Brave Improves Its Ad-Blocker Performance with New Engine in Rust

#206

Brave isn't a choice for me 'cause Google can easily kill all Chrome clones in one funny day. Also Brave monetization looks very tricky.

Second point I agree on, first point--how? Chromium is opensource. What can google do?

Re: Brave Improves Its Ad-Blocker Performance with New Engine in Rust

#207
post #46
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s wrong with Firefox?

Just last week, we found out that they sat on a severe vulnerability for 2 months, only bothering to patch it after someone used it to try to pwn Coinbase[1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20233952

They had reason for that, as mentioned in the thread you linked.

Re: Brave Improves Its Ad-Blocker Performance with New Engine in Rust

#209

Brave isn't a choice for me 'cause Google can easily kill all Chrome clones in one funny day. Also Brave monetization looks very tricky.

Second point I agree on, first point--how? Chromium is opensource. What can google do?

People need to stop with this argument. Chromium might be open source, but it's still Google who decides what get merged. And yes, people can fork, do their own patches, fixes, but if it deviates too much from Google, you'll end up with a new browser to maintain on your end without a team the size of Google. If all theses teams choose to not implement their own browser, it's for a reason: a web browser is a complex piece of software. And the best example of this is the Edge team who forfeited implementing their own and just went with Chromium.

Re: Brave Improves Its Ad-Blocker Performance with New Engine in Rust

#210
post #123
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switched from Firefox to Brave in the last year across devices and not looking back (though I do miss containers!). Blocking ads and trackers by default is pretty much essential in 2019. The myth about ad replacement doesn't seem to want to die though! There is no ad replacement, though the roadmap says at some time in the future publishers who opt-in will have the option to have their ad-slots filled by Brave's priv…

I just use Firefox with uBlock Origin on all my devices. Better blocking than Brave and no concerns about future monetization.

Firefox needs to respect the OS certificate store instead of using its own. Without it client-cert authenticated sites cannot be accessed. IT admins usually have policies on Windows and MacOS that prevent export of client cert+priv key.
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