Brave refurbishes Rust adblocking engine for reduced memory footprint Brave Software has reworked its browser's Rust-based adblock engine to make it significantly more memory efficient and perhaps more secure. So you get fewer ads now with fewer MB of RAM. According to Shivan Kaul Sahib, VP of privacy and security for Brave, company software engineers have been able to reduce memory consumption …
The Mozilla Foundation is utterly dysfunctional, gave up on reducing memory consumption, and seemingly only remains active to frustrate and disappoint its users.
And yet I won't switch. Hard pass on any browser which isn't open source, which integrates/allows advertising, or which is built on Chromium.
Can some tech philanthropist just freaking fork Firefox and Thunderbird to a new, functional organization?
And I tell everyone about it for their smartphones. Brave has saved me an untold quantity of data bandwidth by cutting out what I don't need and leaving me with what I actually want to see on that damn handheld screen (that I hate - mostly because my customers have my number and some of them have no notion of what time is too late to phone someone).
I have installed Brave on all my computers and laptops as well, and I have made it the default for my wife's laptop, my daughter's laptop, and I am endlessly advocating it to anyone who will listen if the conversation crops up.
Fuck ads. Long live Brave (and Firefox with NoScript and uBlock Unity).
Oh please. Not everything has to be about politics. Brendan Eich was getting the job done at Mozilla until some activist got into his private life and stirred the pot. He's the inventor of javascript ffs. One of the Internet's best. Now he's running a company that's doing more to make the Internet usable than any "ai" slop factory could ever imagine, and you're still dumping on him because he has opinions (that he *doesn't bring to work*) that hurt your delicate sensibilities.
I use Brave. I love it. It's the browser we all need.
They're not just technical. They are technical issues being painted in the worst possible light. I stopped reading part way in because it's clear that the author hates & is dumping.
Brave was trying hard to find a way to get funding that did NOT end up going the way that Mozilla has gone. To that end, they were probing what was technically possible & socially acceptable. Like a lot of research, they had more failures than success. What he perhaps did not anticipate is that, having successfully driven him from Mozilla, the hounds were NOT being called off, and anything innovative he tried would be attacked. Pioneers, they say, are the ones with arrows in their backs. Doubly so in this case.
Which were:
- overwriting others' ads with their own
- running donation campaigns using people's names who had not given their permission (e.g. Tom Scott)
- overwriting others' referrer links with their own
- turning the new tab page into an ad in a supposedly ad-free browser
- insecure Tor
- sell data obtained by their search/AI scraper using a user-agent that claims to be Google so it probably won't be blocked
- advanced fingerprint protection dropped in a supposed privacy browser
Brave was trying hard to find a way to get funding that did NOT end up going the way that Mozilla has gone.
None of the ways Brave tried to get money were legitimate.
To that end, they were probing what was technically possible & socially acceptable. Like a lot of research, they had more failures than success.
You're excusing behaviour that should have been discarded before the design stage.
What he perhaps did not anticipate is that, having successfully driven him from Mozilla, the hounds were NOT being called off, and anything innovative he tried would be attacked.
It's quite easy to get the hounds called off - don't engage in sketchy behaviour. Vivaldi hasn't found the need to do any of the above things that Brave has.
Fascinating stuff. After several years, a new language, FlatBuffers, and a VP blog post, the industry has once again discovered that allocating less memory, copying data less, and not parsing the same thing repeatedly makes software faster and uses less RAM.
In the old days we called this “thinking before malloc”. Now it’s a security breakthrough enabled by Rust.
Don’t get me wrong, good work. It’s just funny watching basic data-layout discipline get rediscovered every decade, each time under a shinier banner, with a larger team and a longer press release.
Somewhere a 1990s engineer is nodding quietly and going back to their coffee.
I suspect that given the skyrocketing price of memory thanks to the AI bros, we're going to see many more stories like this one, as software developers the world over suddenly rediscover the virtues of resource efficiency. Dare we hope that "Who cares about efficiency, just throw more cores and storage at it" will become an attitude as unacceptable as "sod the environment, just chop down some more rainforest"?
I use AdAway from F-Droid. org for my Android device and have over 1 million ad, tracker and malware sites blocked.
I combined Developer Dan's trackers. Facebook and ads hosts files plus another massive hosts file found on GitHub and removed any duplicates using sort on an Android terminal emulator.
AdAway is open source and completely free and shows you domains being connected to by DNS and lets you block or allow any DNS request and also make backups of your custom block lists in json format.
You can add hosts lists from a URL or locally on the devices Internal SD card.
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