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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

#361

Post by michaelmrose »

tapoxi wrote: post #355
michaelmrose wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertising is literally an attempt to manipulate people in a way that subverts their interests. It's like you are making money by giving a "free" concert wherein you are paid to kick the audience in the nuts and now you are shocked that people are starting to wear a cup.

Then if you object to advertising, don't view content backed by advertising.

However much you might wish it to be so clicking a link doesn't create an enforceable contract between me and you.

So why when my maximum benefit is blocking ads AND viewing content should I change my behavior.

Blocking ads has been a thing for 17 years and will probably be a thing for the next 17.

If you could force me to watch your ads you wouldn't have to ask

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

#362

Post by justsee »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #238
justsee wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah sorry those options are on the desktop build. Perhaps there are tickets in the github repo to add this to mobile builds?

I don't see them on the desktop build either.

Preferences -> Social Media Blocking.

If you don't see them I could only guess that maybe you have an old version of the browser installed?

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

#364

Post by lern_too_spel »

ForHackernews wrote: post #222
lern_too_spel wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The content producers who distributed their videos on YouTube agreed to Google's monetization terms. They did not agree to Brave's. I cannot unilaterally make copies of Harry Potter books, sell them for a dollar, and give a cut (even a 50% cut to make the Brave analogy complete — they like to say they give a larger cut to publishers without mentioning that it is a larger cut of a much smaller pie) to JK Rowling. Even…

But Google should be allowed to unilaterally copy snippets of data from all the websites on the internet into their search results? People bending themselves backwards to hate Brave for doing things that are really not that different from what the big boys do.

> But Google should be allowed to unilaterally copy snippets of data from all the websites on the internet into their search results?

No, and they don't. See meta nosnippet and robots.txt.

If the big boys did what Brave did, they would be sued to oblivion.

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

#365

Post by jchw »

agumonkey wrote: post #198
jchw wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way they’re handling cookies may be just be strict enough that it can break security measures on some sites. Unfortunately, lots of websites have come to rely on things that maybe should’ve never been features (like third party cookies, for example.) Just out of curiosity, have you tried Firefox? I know it’s not perfect, but with minimal tweaking I think it’s very competitive.

Show your tweaks.

I don't do anything too special, no userstyles for me or anything like that. I generally just do the following:

- Remove the spacers next to the address bar. (I prefer having a huge address bar.)

- Install uBlock Origin, Bitwarden, and a few other extensions (GitHub Notifier, for example.) I don't use Firefox Sync right now, so I do this manually per install.

- Disable "Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order." I prefer the old Ctrl+Tab behavior where Ctrl+Tab moves right and Ctrl+Shift+Tab moves left.

- Set search to Duck Duck Go.

- Disable all Home content except Search.

- Disable browser, download, form and password history. Tweak content blocking settings a bit. (I generally 'block third party trackers' but I aspire to block all third party cookies if that ever becomes supported by most websites.)

Sometimes I also tweak other random things, like disabling the clipboard APIs entirely to avoid sites that attempt to add garbage to the end of copies. But realistically, these are the things that I usually keep the same. On portable devices I sometimes also enable permanent private mode, to keep even less sensitive data in storage.

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

#366

Post by ahartmetz »

bscphil wrote: post #354
mmmrk wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by ugly? That GDI text rendering is used on Windows instead of DirectWrite for some font families? This can be disabled in about:config by assigning `gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.force_gdi_classic_for_families` an empty value. Or do you mean that there's no subpixel positioning on non-Windows/macOS? That one has no fix, except when the text rendering part of WebRender goes into production.

I'm confused. Doesn't Firefox use Freetype on Linux? Freetype has subpixel rendering.

AFAICT Firefox text rendering has always been fine on Linux. Chrome until a year or two ago had no subpixel antialiasing, different gamma for antialiasing, or whatever - its text rendering used to look ugly, or more neutrally: different from everything else.

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

#367

Post by jjwhitaker »

robbrown451 wrote: post #41

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…

I wonder how that might work in combo with PiHole or similar on my network. Like, if they are replacing ads are those ads then blocked anyway or slip streamed through?

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

#368

Post by nwah1 »

mindcandy wrote: post #325
wila wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not claiming they are doing something nefarious. Trust is something you have to earn. I do not install Chrome as I do not trust google. They have too much of my data already. Brave claims at their main page: "Brave is open source and built by a team of privacy focused, performance oriented pioneers of the web." OK well they failed my 5 minute test. Not having removed the SSDP parts is one thing. Not uninstalling…

You are implying that they are doing something nefarious by omission. Because it’s implied, you also gave yourself the escape hatch to say “Where did I say that?” When called out on it. A reasonable person reading your comment would think you are claiming the Brave team added code to surveil your network. If they dig deeper through the link you provided, they learn that the reality is that they inherited code from th…

It doesn't matter if Brave is nefarious or not. Extra data transmission means extra possibility for third parties to gain access to it... hackers, governments, etc.

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

#369

Post by alexnewman »

traek wrote: post #161
alexnewman wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, in my sparetime I help some of the linux packaging for Brave. We are looking for people to help us do this very thing. We provide packaged for deb, rpm, and snap. I maintain the snaps for brave but have been disappointed with the performance. If you are willing to test an maintain distros we'd be more than happy to get you involved.

Brave is a private, for-profit company that has raised $42 million in venture funding—out of curiosity why do you bother doing free work for them in your spare time?

I also contribute to linux kernel, and tons of open source projects. In this case, I am pushing that users should manage the packages as it gives the distro a bit of independence. this is also the apache way which i am a member of.

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

#370

Post by alexnewman »

ppseafield wrote: post #178
traek wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave is a private, for-profit company that has raised $42 million in venture funding—out of curiosity why do you bother doing free work for them in your spare time?

Maybe the effort isn't for the company, but for the distros and their users. Is nvidia packaging its proprietary drivers for Ubuntu?

No it's for the project.
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