Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

brave.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 289 posts

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

#271

Post by elektor »

temp0826 wrote: post #169
avazhi wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here I am on IOS where Brave but not Firefox can use adblockers. My fucking god I’m not sure enshittification has ever been so widely dispersed. It’s impossible to have any type of unified set up across different OS/devices currently.

Kagi's Orion on iOS is good, and supports ff/chrome extensions

Kind of, but not really, the ublock origin app doesn't work on Orion. I tried both Kagi + uBlock versus Brave and their built-in ad-block and Brave had a much better performance.

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

#272

Post by temp0826 »

elektor wrote: post #271
temp0826 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi's Orion on iOS is good, and supports ff/chrome extensions

Kind of, but not really, the ublock origin app doesn't work on Orion. I tried both Kagi + uBlock versus Brave and their built-in ad-block and Brave had a much better performance.

Fwiw Orion uses the actual extensions, not the uBO Lite app (for Safari) that I think you're referring to.

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

#273

Post by nialv7 »

skaul wrote: post #244
llm_nerd wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, they claim the adblock engine saw a 75% reduction in memory usage, and in the images they're showing the main browser process generally (I assume? I don't use Brave), or which the adblock engine is only a part but had a substantial impact on usage.

That is correct.

thanks for the clarification. is this 45MB reduction for the whole browser? or is this 45MB per tab?

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

#274

Post by cromka »

elektor wrote: post #271
temp0826 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi's Orion on iOS is good, and supports ff/chrome extensions

Kind of, but not really, the ublock origin app doesn't work on Orion. I tried both Kagi + uBlock versus Brave and their built-in ad-block and Brave had a much better performance.

True, none of the extensions I tried actually worked as intended.

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

#275

Post by cromka »

drnick1 wrote: post #46
ipsum2 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's annoying, but Brave makes it pretty easy to remove, so you only have to do it once per installation.

As far as I am concerned, this is more about Brave going through a vetting process and an independent build than only turning off annoyances.

Indeed. It's basically like trying to get them into Debian main repo. If it works, then it's truly free.

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

#276

Post by jorvi »

oktoberpaard wrote: post #248
jorvi wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is better (especially than the Manifest V3 version) because it has first party access / integration. In general, of 3rd party blockers, uBlock Origin isn't even the best, AdGuard is.

> In general, of 3rd party blockers, uBlock Origin isn't even the best, AdGuard is. Why? I thought uBlock Origin on Firefox was the most effective combination available (assuming that you use the same filter lists).

The main reason for people repeating "uBlock Origin + Firefox is best" is because CNAME uncloaking didn't work on most Chromium browsers, even on Manifest V2. It does on Brave.

AdGuard works better simply because there's a bunch of people being paid to work on it. There's more optimization and less bugs. The UI is a whole lot more polished. Blocklists have improved syntax, and the lists themselves are updated more frequently to catch site breakage. EasyList often has breakage on their lists for months even after being reported on their Github, but reporting the same breakage to AdGuard results in the breakage being fixed in days if not hours. And they do adjacent projects like AdGuard Home (sort of a commercial Pi-Hole) too.

FWIW, big names in adblocking work for these companies too. AFAIK, FanBoy (EasyList + EasyPrivacy + his own lists) gets paid by Brave to maintain the lists. So in a way, Brave is funding adblocking for everyone :)

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

#277

Post by drnick1 »

DaSHacka wrote: post #133
bastawhiz wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux distros won't host the code for the commercial bits. It doesn't matter if you can hide it, it's the fact that it's there at all

Yet they have no issue with Mozilla?

Mozilla does not have commercial bits. They do receive money from Google to be the default search engine, and the binaries they build report telemetry, but the versions found in Linux repos often either patch out the telemetry or disable it.

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

#278

Post by VladVladikoff »

BrendanEich wrote: post #264
VladVladikoff wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wild accusations considering this stuff still exists online as direct evidence: https://brave.com/blog/binance/ Also attacking the person instead of the ideas is really not in the spirit of HN.

That blog post is about a partnership (which ended), but you probably saw some sponsored images at the time, in new tab pages (1 of 4 then, I think; the rest are just art images). These are non-tracking, carefully designed (including vetting by Brave), brand advertising images. They are not ads (we never did this) inserted into publisher pages, or (opt-in only) push notifications. Brave has been working to find ways…

“Sponsored images”

What exactly do you think an advertisement is?

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

#279

Post by SavioMak »

rohin15 wrote: post #179

It's getting harder and harder to main Firefox. Brave's split tab feature is simple but so brilliant.

Firefox has experimental split tab hidden inside about:config since 146.0 (December 9, 2025)

https://winaero.com/how-to-enable-split-view-in-firefox-146/

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

#280

Post by BenjiWiebe »

Cyph0n wrote: post #195
saagarjha wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’d list it in your attribution?

I am unfamiliar with the details of distro packaging. Do they commonly use the attribution to route CVEs? Regardless, the maintenance burden remains.

I believe some distros require un-vendoring before accepting the package.

If the code you vendored was well hidden so the distro maintainer didn't notice, perhaps the bad guys would also fail to realize you were using (for instance) libxml2, and not consider your software a target for attack.

Post reply on HN