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Brave overhauled its Rust adblock engine with FlatBuffers, cutting memory 75%

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Re: Brave overhauled its Rust adblock engine with FlatBuffers, cutting memory 75%

#251

Post by uyzstvqs »

drnick1 wrote: post #24

I am surprised there does not exist a community fork of Brave yet that strips out all of the commercial stuff (rewards, AI, own updates), making it suitable for inclusion in the repos of mainstream free/libre Linux distros.

You can disable all of that within seconds. There's no reason for it not to be included because of that, as all the code running on the client is open-source. If distros only shipped software without commercial interests (why even..?), it'd be an unusable mess of barely maintained hobby projects.

And you should really be using https://flathub.org/en/apps/com.brave.Browser

Re: Brave overhauled its Rust adblock engine with FlatBuffers, cutting memory 75%

#252

Post by satvikpendem »

theultdev wrote: post #236
Retr0id wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if anti-adblock devs will ever take advantage of the difference between the two

Used to work in this realm. It doesn't matter. Easylist will contact you, strongarm you into disabling your countermeasures and threaten to block all JS on your page if you don't comply. So no ad servers can load, no prebid, nothing will function/load if the user has an adblocker that uses easylist (all of them) installed.

That is hilarious to be fair, like a modern day Robin Hood.

Re: Brave overhauled its Rust adblock engine with FlatBuffers, cutting memory 75%

#254

Post by jonkoops »

nialv7 wrote: post #182

162 to 104 is not 75% reduction... Who calculates reduction percentage like that?!

"Brave has overhauled its Rust-based adblock engine to reduce memory consumption by 75%"

This only claims that the memory usage of the adblock engine was reduced, not the total memory consumption of the browser.

Re: Brave overhauled its Rust adblock engine with FlatBuffers, cutting memory 75%

#255

Post by theultdev »

satvikpendem wrote: post #252
theultdev wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Used to work in this realm. It doesn't matter. Easylist will contact you, strongarm you into disabling your countermeasures and threaten to block all JS on your page if you don't comply. So no ad servers can load, no prebid, nothing will function/load if the user has an adblocker that uses easylist (all of them) installed.

That is hilarious to be fair, like a modern day Robin Hood.

It was an interesting experience.

I'm still not entirely sure it's for the best or not.

On one hand, it is a concentration of power into hands a few people.

On the other, it is for a good cause, to maintain a list of ad network and site banners that drain resources, cause privacy issues, etc.

The Easylist people aren't saints. They get paid off by Google to allow "Acceptable Ads". So you just show a different campaigns if your user is running adblocker nowadays.

Re: Brave overhauled its Rust adblock engine with FlatBuffers, cutting memory 75%

#256

Post by satvikpendem »

theultdev wrote: post #255
satvikpendem wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is hilarious to be fair, like a modern day Robin Hood.

It was an interesting experience. I'm still not entirely sure it's for the best or not. On one hand, it is a concentration of power into hands a few people. On the other, it is for a good cause, to maintain a list of ad network and site banners that drain resources, cause privacy issues, etc. The Easylist people aren't saints. They get paid off by Google to allow "Acceptable Ads". So you just show a different campaig…

Well, I run EasyList for most ads and then also other filters to remove "acceptable ads" so it works well for me.

Re: Brave overhauled its Rust adblock engine with FlatBuffers, cutting memory 75%

#257

Post by jzebedee »

theultdev wrote: post #236
Retr0id wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if anti-adblock devs will ever take advantage of the difference between the two

Used to work in this realm. It doesn't matter. Easylist will contact you, strongarm you into disabling your countermeasures and threaten to block all JS on your page if you don't comply. So no ad servers can load, no prebid, nothing will function/load if the user has an adblocker that uses easylist (all of them) installed.

That's amazing. I just assumed the ad lists were volunteer maintained like a wiki. I'll be sure to use Easylist now that I know they're also advocating for users while punishing bad advertisers.

Re: Brave overhauled its Rust adblock engine with FlatBuffers, cutting memory 75%

#258

Post by theultdev »

satvikpendem wrote: post #256
theultdev wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was an interesting experience. I'm still not entirely sure it's for the best or not. On one hand, it is a concentration of power into hands a few people. On the other, it is for a good cause, to maintain a list of ad network and site banners that drain resources, cause privacy issues, etc. The Easylist people aren't saints. They get paid off by Google to allow "Acceptable Ads". So you just show a different campaig…

Well, I run EasyList for most ads and then also other filters to remove "acceptable ads" so it works well for me.

I wasn't implying there weren't workarounds.

Just that Easylist is indirectly funded by ad revenue (google)

When it comes to ads, it's about the bulk of people, most don't run anything other than the default lists.

Re: Brave overhauled its Rust adblock engine with FlatBuffers, cutting memory 75%

#259

Post by ComputerGuru »

goku12 wrote: post #205
ComputerGuru wrote: post #15

Is that 45 MiB per-tab? People are laughing it off, but since each tab is a process these days..

Those may be forked copies of the main adblocker process. If so, you'll get the benefit of CoW page deduplication.

Windows (sanely) doesn’t do fork.

Shared memory obviously exists, though and they do mention in the post (missed it first time around) that they try to share Adblock resources.

Re: Brave overhauled its Rust adblock engine with FlatBuffers, cutting memory 75%

#260

Post by bsclifton »

weedhopper wrote: post #37
skaul wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or does it still replace them with ads for scanmy cryptocurrency? Brave never did that. Brave blocks third-party ads & trackers by default. (disclaimer: I lead privacy and adblocking at Brave)

lead what? https://archive.is/W0k4j (disclaimer: people remember how sketchy Brave is)

Already shared, but that (what you linked to) was a proposal and no deliverable was ever publicly released. A simple prototype was made and tested by a limited number of employees - instead of showing an ad, it would show a picture of a mustachioed man as a placeholder. That silly picture would be replaced with real code if the idea panned out. It didn't. The idea and the code was canned before I joined Brave and I've been here for almost 10 years (I joined August 2016).

Disclaimer in case it's not obvious: I am a Brave employee

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