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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

#251
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.

Doing that gives me a weird, inexplicable feeling. I know Firefox blocks stuff, especially if you set tracker blocking to "Strict". It doesn't block all ads so I still want to use uBO... but do I disable Firefox's blocking to avoid doing the same thing twice? Or are there things Firefox handles better than uBO? It's really too much thinking so for now I'm using Edge Chromium with uBO, and that's not a solution :D

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

#252
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're presumably gaining the other non-performance advantages of Rust over C++ (i.e. the borrow checker etc.) though, so safer and faster is a win. As you say though, they seem to focus on performance but that might just be the audience they see themselves talking to.

I think "Chrome but faster" would convince a mainstream audience pretty well, even though they might not be aware that they're not going to notice the milliseconds.

if you're moving from Firefox to brave you do notice the speed increase. FF on my work laptop (i5, 16GB of ram) and my s8 is significantly slower that brave.

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

#253
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes? Generating and serving content isn't free. If you don't want the ads, don't visit the page or pay for an ad-free version.

This ignores the actual issue with ads, which is tracking . Advertising has this huge system around it where your information is the commodity. This means that advertising inherently is not something you "opt into" when you visit a page. You are being tracked everywhere you go. That's the problem brave solves, but it accepts that removing ads without another system to reward content creators is important - hence BAT.

Agreed - the only reason ad-blocking is even a thing is because:

- Overuse of tracking, including nefarious attempts to de-anonymise users through excessive fingerprinting

- Crappy, distracting, in-your-face ads

- Ad networks serving malware (rare, obv)

If ad networks focussed on ridding the world of these issues, more people would be happy to let the ads through and help support content creators through ads.

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

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

I don't understand why you think this means that Google can easily kill all Chrome clones in one funny day .

They definitely can't reasonably do that but in the long run I don't think Brave has the resources to maintain a hard fork from Chromium. That's the main reason I don't really get the Brave hype when Firefox does the job just fine and is actually a fully independent codebase instead of a relatively shallow customization of Chromium.

The only argument that keeps coming up is that Brave has a built-in adblocker but it's not like installing ublock origin is very challenging in Firefox (and on top of that your extensions are automatically synchronized if you use the Sync feature) and the relatively blurry monetization scheme of Brave makes me think that in the long run this built-in ad-blocker might prove a liability more than a strength. I'll take my ad-blocking independent, third-party and non-profit, thank you.

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

#255
post #232
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This same argument is true of nearly all companies, including "not for profit." For instance the chair at Mozilla/FireFox pays himself $1.1 million a year, the treasurer $1 million. [1] And those numbers are probably higher now. That's from 2016, the most recent published data on their site. Since 2013 [2] their CEO has increased his yearly compensation by more than $300k, and the treasurer increased his pay by more…

And ? The Linux foundation heads have a similar salary range, like many other foundations and it is not an issue. "Not for profit" means with a public stated goal, means that your share holder will not suddenly overcome your company strategy and make you sell all your client data, or make you sell bananas, because "it's more profitable on short term". That is not an hypothetical scenario, many IT companies already fe…

What is the difference between having the share holders taking decisions for the users against user wishes, or having the heads of a non profit organization doing the same (like Mozzila did quite some times)?

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

#256
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is uBlock terrible?

Yes? Generating and serving content isn't free. If you don't want the ads, don't visit the page or pay for an ad-free version.

You want to earn money with your content?

Charge for it instead of uploading it to a platform that shows ads, OR upload it to a platform that can't be used with adblockers!

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

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ignores the actual issue with ads, which is tracking . Advertising has this huge system around it where your information is the commodity. This means that advertising inherently is not something you "opt into" when you visit a page. You are being tracked everywhere you go. That's the problem brave solves, but it accepts that removing ads without another system to reward content creators is important - hence BAT.

Agreed - the only reason ad-blocking is even a thing is because: - Overuse of tracking, including nefarious attempts to de-anonymise users through excessive fingerprinting - Crappy, distracting, in-your-face ads - Ad networks serving malware (rare, obv) If ad networks focussed on ridding the world of these issues, more people would be happy to let the ads through and help support content creators through ads.

I partially disagree.

All adds are subconscious manipulation.

I hate them, no matter if they track me or are in-your-face. I will always use an ad-blocker, but allow ads if a site asks me to do so, and I enjoy the content.

But I realize I'm probably in a minority here. Most users would not bother with adblockers if ads would not degrade the web experience so much.

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

#258
I've switched from chrome to Brave (with duckduckgo as default search engine) after seeing this https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity and really satisfied with the result.

Unfortunately Firefox is not a good match. I've tried the latest versions of Firefox and the developer edition, before using Brave and it still uses so much CPU in my macbook and the fan of the laptop sounds like an airplane is about to take off.

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

#259

I've switched from chrome to Brave (with duckduckgo as default search engine) after seeing this https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity and really satisfied with the result. Unfortunately Firefox is not a good match. I've tried the latest versions of Firefox and the developer edition, before using Brave and it still uses so much CPU in my macbook and the fan of the laptop sounds like an airplane is about to take off…

Maybe you want to opt out of Google activity tracking? When I go to that page it says "No Activity".

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

#260
post #119

The discussion in this thread makes me wonder if Brave is a good browser to recommend to friends & family. The widespread usage of Chrome was probably largely in part due to folks like us recommending it to friends & family.

A simple guide:

Does it make money by showing you ads?

Chrome: Yes Brave: Yes Firefox: No

If yes, then they need to track your behavior in detail. I'm sure your family deserves more.

Give them Firefox, turn on Webrender (it's awesome even today - biggest speedup you can get in FF).

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