Firefox integrates an ad-blocker, but not to block ads

Firefox 149 quietly shipped an interesting new feature buried in the code. As Mozilla bug #2013888 documents, the browser maker incorporated Brave's Rust-based adblock engine back in March - a detail surfaced in a blog post by Shivan Kaul Sahib, VP of Privacy and Security at Brave. The important thing here is that although …

[Liam Proven]

Update: the Rust adblock manager addon is a temporary one, and when I restarted Firefox this morning, it was automatically removed and µBlock Origin reinstated. :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

uBlock Origin can block the ugly images

But it can't fix the idiots who assigned "serif" as a fallback for sans-serif fonts....

Nor the lack of information on timestamps and categories on index pages.

[M.V. Lipvig]

That's nice. Now let's review something important - comments on the new site format.

The overal consensus is, the new format sucks donkey balls, none of your viewers, ie customers, like it and we all want you to change it back to the old format and fonts. And, slap whoever came up with this with a monkfish, left out in the sun a couple of weeks.

[David 132]

"The overal consensus is, the new format sucks donkey balls, none of your viewers, ie customers, like it and we all want you to change it back to the old format and fonts. And, slap whoever came up with this with a monkfish, left out in the sun a couple of weeks."

"...but apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?"

[Anonymous Coward]

The bastards didn't finish it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm OK-ish with the new format, with one exception: the one reason I come here often has been relegated to the smallest icons on the page: the comments.

Sorry guys, but you need to make them a tad more accessible. Comments give you your engagement, make them harder to find and I'm suddenly less interested. I'd reserve the fish for whoever decided that design aspect..

[FIA]

There was a brief time when the new layout appeared without a comment button.

My thought was 'Which news site will I read now?'

[Evil Auditor]

...none of your viewers, ie customers...

If you pay for reading El Reg, you can consider yourself a customer. I agree with the rest though.

[Anonymous Coward]

... the new format sucks donkey balls ...

Thanks for that.

I spent some time last night wondering what to say to express my disgust at this new 'format' but everything I came up with was really rude.

Thought it was because I had not taken my evening pill, but no. 8^°

But the problem lies not in the format *designer* ie: "... whoever came up with this" ...

It lies squarely on the shoulders of whoever gave the go-ahead to implement it.

Have them slapped with a monkfish would be excessively lenient.

How did ElReg end up like this?

.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fail... and how

I naturally assumed the site had been hijacked in some new AI-inspired MITM attack specifically to harvest my valuable Reg handle for pimping out to $BAD_REGIME trolls. I can only assume the Reg Manglement asked its correspondents to write a brief introduction to the new shiny shiny look, and to a person they all refused on the grounds that their down-votes would exceed some multi-byte integer hard limit and crash the whole edifice.

It was with great relief that I found the bijou-ette comment icons and the usual crew of CommenTurds. I devoutly hope that the new "skin" will last as long as the skin on a cheap startup barista's latte and be consigned to the Dishwasher of Fate forthwith.

AC because I still can't quite believe it isn't some sort of devious plot.

[eldakka]

Even worse, they've broken (or deliberately removed) the /Week page that just gave the stories in a single column list ordered by date (most recent at top). That has been my go-to for decades on the Reg.

[Anonymous Coward]

JavaScript

I came to this article to post my complaint about the new Elreg format as well.

I chose this particular article because it deals with a browser and ad blocking .

Many commentards such as myself only browse the web with JavaScript disabled because of malvertising.

My siblings laptop was infected with a fileless rootkit that was installed by JavaScript on the official website of a well known and trusted news organization because of an "ad" that warned them that their browser was out of date that looked like an official browser warning.

The open source forensics suite "Autopsy" revealed that the malware was named "firefox_update<epoch timestamp>.js

JavaScript is also used to fingerprint users devices for tracking browsing history as well as deploying the latest iPhone malware "Coruna" which is another reason I only browse the web with JavaScript disabled.

I can no longer read the comments on Elreg because the comments button is no longer visible with JavaScript disabled and now the font size is too small on my mobile device.

I also see new buttons to share with social media but I have all social media and their associated buttons blocked by my system-wide ad blocker as do many users on this site.

I used to openly praise Elreg for how clean the site was and how it was fully functional with JavaScript disabled and could even post a comment with cookies blocked.

It's ironic to me that the web designers at Elreg pushed this new unwanted design change just a day or two after an article about how Microsoft keeps foisting unwanted changes to Windows users that detract from the user experience.

I mainly come to Elreg to read users comments on articles and shouldn't have to enable JavaScript to do so.

Very disappointed.

Please listen to your readers and revert the Elreg site back to its original clean and readable form.

[ianbetteridge]

Customers? How much are you paying per month?

[b0llchit]

Design?

Suddenly, nothing can be found any more and looks sadly stuffed with page fill before you actually get down to the badly formatted real article list.

Where is the forum link (and comment count) in the article?

(and, if you need Javascript to see a page properly, then you are doing it wrong. You people of a tech-site should know this.)

[Alumoi]

Re: Design?

They're doing it the USian way, everything must look like the crappy UI mobile interface. Usability be damned!

[b0llchit]

Re: Design?

With a 3.5 MB transferred payload (4.5..5.8 MB expanded) to get to the front page. Where is the "mobile interface" in that?

Damn, I do long for the times of 56k6 modems when websites loaded faster.

[ecofeco]

Re: Design?

So does everyone... except marketing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Design?

Almost. That was also the time when some morons were using blinking text.

I hope they've been all put on bin duty or something, but given the fight for (to use a dot.con term) "eyeballs" I'm certain that one of the current villains is about to bring it back.

It'll be either Trump or Musk.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Design?

I use Brave. The Reg looks clean as a whistle when viewing the site. I tried it in Chrome and a third of my page is covered in ads. The same ad, three times. I closed Chrome.

Firefox used to be relevant years ago, but now its like a Lada with a new spoiler.

[skein]

Re: Design?

Just use ublock origin in everything. And don’t use chrome. Ever.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Design?

.. or its twisted, even more evil cousin, Edge..

[Guido Esperanto]

Re: Design?

I did use Brave , and to its credit, it did a fine job of blocking ads. On top of my pi-hole perhaps the best browser so far in terms of that capability.

However, some El Reg regs gave me a few choice details on why Brave ISNT the most ethical choice for a browser

https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/

[Liam Proven]

Re: Design?

> However, some El Reg regs gave me a few choice details on why Brave ISNT the most ethical choice for a browser

>

> https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/

That would be me, here:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2025/04/03/zorin-os-173-takes-brave-step-of-changing-default-browser/379741

Also, do note the follow-up to the link you cited, by another author:

https://thelibre.news/no-really-dont-use-brave/

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Design?

https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/

This article is pure cancel culture. The software installs were rolled back and they apologized. As for the other stuff, 'I don't like his statements on same sex marriage so no one can use this software.' Where the software itself has nothing to do with it. I care how Brave performs, I do not care about the opinions of it's creator. If they start throwing up their opinions on the splash page then I'll reconsider. But until then it blocks malware and crap that Chrome pushes through to make $$$ from.

I hate to break it to you, but the world has people in it that don't believe what you do. If you are liberal, there are *GASP* conservatives out there. Indeed, there are more differences than commonalities across the global spectrum. How many people do you know that agree with you 100% on everything?

There is enough 'us versus them' today without throwing software choices into the political correctness blender. Chrome is owned by Google who literally removed their "do no evil" branding FFS.

Facebook, Coinbase, Basecamp, Twitter, Cloudflare and Uber have all had owners saying controversial things so you don't use any of those services, right?

If you choose to not use things based on objectionable statements or beliefs from their owners, you must live in a cave now.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Design?

Maybe it should not be a a deciding factor, depends on how you see the world. But if there are alternatives that do not carry a stench I think I'll go for those first and that's the point here - there are alternatives. Which you choose, well, that does say something about you because in thise case there's nothing forcing you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Design?

Firefox remains quite relevant as the only major browser which answers to the community, not Big Tech.

You use Brave, which is Chromium based, and thus helps Google use its browser market share to dictate web standards to the detriment of the open web. It wasn't good when Internet Explorer created a browser monoculture, either.

If you care about preserving open web standards, use Firefox.

[blu3b3rry]

Re: Design?

Can only concur. I don't see what advantages Brave brings to the table over just running Firefox + uBlock.

Did have a bit of a play about using Brave a few days back, as it happens. Apart from the adblocking it seemed to just be Chrome with a few more custom bits nailed to it.

[herman]

Re: Design?

Brave works for me and there is also something called Firefox Focus that works well on phones. Advertisements are for the little people.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Design?

/week has been crappified as well, it redirects to /archive, but that has loads of annoying, distracting, content-free, and thus useless images.

I don't care if /week is renamed, but hate pointless images ... I just want a compact list of article titles.

And "dive into", really? I'm not 5.

[skein]

Re: Design?

Has it been renamed? I loathe the new design and just want my (almost) image free, chronologically-ordered Register back, please.

[David M]

Re: Design?

Seconded! I only discovered /week recently, and it was a breath of fresh air.

[David 132]

Re: Design?

Amen.

You'd think the Reg team, being aware that their readership are technical, crotchety, and strongly opinionated (and I don't mean those pejoratively) would at least have piloted the new layout for a period first ("new.theregister.com" / "old.theregister.com" à la Reddit, for example).

Don't know how much is down to my innate neophobia, but my initial reaction to the new layout is that I hate it. Too many images, seemingly random article placement (a few minutes ago I clicked on an interesting-looking story that was prominent on the front page, only to notice that it actually dates from 3 months ago) and the font-choice is jarring.

Grumble, grumble.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Design?

Who's to say they haven't been replaced by an AI agent that is now optimising the website for other agents?

[nick_stokie]

Re: Design?

And RSS feed seems to have disappeared as well? My reliable source of http://www.theregister.co.uk/headlines.atom now gets a 404.

The links in the recent Reg article (https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/03/09/rss-dulls-the-pain-of-the-modern-web/5226760) about RSS which point to Register Feeds (https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/feeds.html) also brings up a 404.

[nobody who matters]

Re: Design?

Just looks like change for the sake of change to me - always the very worst reason for making changes (I mean, why else reverse the positions of the login link and the search/menu links on the main pages, and then compound that stupidity with leaving them where they used to be on the comments pages!).

As already said. its an IT news site ffs, but gives the impression of having the same amateur level of tech skills running it as so many other badly set up websites.

The new front page is a complete mess, and why does it need reams of old articles filling it up and making it several times the length it used to be. If it ain't broke, don't try and fix it, because if you do, you wiill break it!.

[David 132]

Re: Design?

"compound that stupidity with leaving them where they used to be on the comments pages"

That just suggests that they haven't got around to applying the new styling to the comments pages yet. Brace for impact!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Design?

Muscle memory. You move your mouse automatically, and then look there. So if they put something else there, you'll click it, and then click back, and then click that link you were looking for before they moved it.

[nagi]

Re: Design?

Seems like the new rss is https://www.theregister.com/?lab_viewport=rss as per https://www.theregister.com/site-news/2026/05/06/weve-only-gone-and-done-it-changed-what-youre-used-to/5230826 and the list here: https://www.theregister.com/design/page/feeds

[M.V. Lipvig]

Re: Design?

Anytime you see a Register employee comment, respond with a complaint. You can tell the employees from the plebs by the vulture in the red square next to their name.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Design?

I must say the new design has left me somewhat nonplussed. It’s just a redesign but it just goes to show how we all adapt to change in different ways.

[Bran Muffin]

Oh Thank Goodness

I thought it was me, maybe one of the medications I take...

The Register's front page leapt out at me like a tiger from the bushes. I don't need a shock like that in the early day.

[EdSaxby]

Re: Oh Thank Goodness

Same! I was thinking I had screwed up my browser settings.

Seriously, it was way too early in the morning to see this (in NZ, heading towards winter) without any fair warning for my eyes.

[Winkypop]

Re: Oh Thank Goodness

I’m now on three different medications because of it!

[eldakka]

Re: Oh Thank Goodness

> I’m now on three different medications because of it!

I chose the wrong week to give up sniffing glue.

[Fustbariclation]

What are the extra advertisements it finds?

I'm surprised it is able to remove so much more crud than pihole.

What is the extra crud?

Wouldn't it make sense to mine the log of the remover code and feed it into pihole to improve it?

Also, does it remove things like the intrusive in-line ads generated by Facebook? It might be well worth the fiddle if it does that.

[David 132]

Re: What are the extra advertisements it finds?

As I understand it, PiHole is purely a DNS white/blacklist filter. So it'll remove ad content that's pulled from a separate domain, purely by 404'ing (or 523'ing?) any requests to ads.sitename.com, but it can't remove content that appears (by DNS trickery or whatever other dark arts) to come from the first-party site.

[Long John Silver]

Ad-blocking bites the hand that feeds us

Ad-blocking is thoroughly reprehensible because it denies income to website owners intent upon bettering mankind through distributing information and entertainment.

Indeed, it is theft in exactly the same manner as bypassing paywalls and has similar purpose to illicitly distributing copyright protected 'content'.

Some people foolishly assume that website information and all other 'content' represented by sequences of binary digits is grist for the mill of the 'free'; the fact that binary sequences may endlessly be reproduced without depriving their originator of anything of tangible monetary worth - as determined by open market 'price discovery' - does not offer due recognition to effort going into the making of a sequence.

Blocking ads is akin to unauthorised 'derivation' from works owned by other people. Ads are integral to the ethos/style of any 'work' presented to the public. The mere fact of the alteration being visible only to the unscrupulous recipient doesn't act as mitigation because the damage has been done.

Until the time when the masses have access only to cloud-connected dumb terminals, it may not be feasible to deter or punish individual users of ad-blockers. However, that shouldn't prevent taking measures against makers and distributors of blockers. Let them be prosecuted and their sites for access be blocked like other unwholesome content.

[skein]

Re: Ad-blocking bites the hand that feeds us

Very good ;)

[Joe W]

Re: Ad-blocking bites the hand that feeds us

I don't mind ads.

Hear me out first. An ad, just a simple picture with a link to the product or company. That's it. Advertise geeky stuff on ElReg, by all means, just a picture and a link. I don't mind that. I even might actually buy some stupid stuff.

And the retirement of the /week page is really bad news. It was sort of sorted and clean looking. And especailly ordered wrt. age. The front page is missing that.

[eldakka]

Re: Ad-blocking bites the hand that feeds us

Generally speaking under current laws, you can't be fored to read, look at or listen to things that someone wants you to.

I don't have to look at the advertising in display windows. Or billboards. Or other road-side signs.

I don't have to sit through a commercial break on TV and watch/listen to it, I can leave the room to make a cuppa (worst case of course, as you can just change the channel etc.).

I don't have to listen to announcements over the store's PA system spruiking some special or other, or listen whan a commentor adds a "goal brought to you by some wanking company <insert companies catch-phrase like 'where you always get off' (because it's a wanking company ...) >".

Advertising on a website is no different. I do not have to listen, watch or view that advertising. Once the code has been sent to my computer, it is up to me how I render it. I can block out bits (using comsetic website filtering), or just refuse to load other bits (blocking ad-serving URLs) that are using my computing resources, bandwidth and quota to display to me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ad-blocking is just cause and effect

In the beginning, ads were just pictures. And then some idiot came up with animation, and then it had to be active contents and the enshittification landslide began.

Next someone started to serve them from someone else and started selling the stats, and that eventually led to Google - I'm skipping a few steps but you get where I'm going.

I have zero problems with ads if I can still find the site in between. Crap like animations of "You would not believe what xxx" sites that force you to read through 10 pages with more ads than ads to get to the point, no, that is the sort of abuse that just isn't acceptable. Or Youtube video's explaining something technical than in text would barely fill half on an A4 if printed (that'll be A5 then, but I digress) just for the clicks, that sort of rubbish.

[MarkMLl]

Pot calling kettle black

The "New Look" El Reg no longer allows users with a heavily locked-down browser (i.e. NoScript etc.) to read article comments, since the "bubble" icon isn't shown above the row inviting us to use Farcebook etc.

[David 132]

Re: Pot calling kettle black

Firefox with UBO and NoScript and sundry other privacy-focussed plugins here, and I see the "bubble" icon just fine. It's also visible at the bottom of each article, next to the relevant tags (e.g. [IBM] [OFF-PREM] ❑). Perhaps the Reg web team's tweaked the code since your comment?

[Maurice Mynah]

Re: Pot calling kettle black

I'm sure they were missing for a while, I had the same experience but the comment icons had returned later the same day. (Other comments to the "Our site look refresh" article, which I would have appreciated before the Shock of the New, had the same observation).

[David 132]

Re: Pot calling kettle black

Well, I might need to temper my earlier optimism.

As I write this, the front-page story related to this one, Mozilla boasts Mythos boosted Firefox bug cull , doesn't have a link to its comments, whether at the top or the bottom of the article. Now, it's possible that comments have been consciously disabled on that story, I suppose, but if so then a clearer indication would be nice.

[That Badger]

Does this change have anything to do with the mass downvoting botnet that's been active here?