brave-core VS adblock-rust

Unrelated but about Brave and interesting to me: I recently found myself having a large upstream project that I need to maintain some custom patches for, and there's a need for deeper customizations and I worry that my rudimentary system of applying .patch files will turn into an unmaintainable nightmare of merge conflicts after every rebase. I was thinking about possible solutions, and it occurred to me that Brave being Chromium-based must have this same challenge but an order of magnitude more difficult, so I looked for their code to see how they solved this issue.

It's pretty interesting! They do basically the same thing for core Chromium, applying a (big) set of patches[1].

Incidentally, I'd be interested to hear any ideas/approaches to this problem. I'm guessing if there was something clearly better, Brave would be doing it, but it seems like there should be a better way even if I can't think of one.

[1] https://github.com/brave/brave-core/tree/master/patches

https://github.com/brave/brave-core/pull/13737

(Incidentally, that PR number is not quite elite. :)

I disagree that it's lip service Brave has a ton of engine level privacy patches https://github.com/brave/brave-core/tree/master/patches

To my understanding you can't match it with just js extensions.

Only firefox on the highest security mode comes close I think?

Or ungoogled chromium? (brave has most of their patches IIRC)

Are there other options that have this number of patches?

Chromium is not 100% Google's forever and always, though they do currently lead the way, and with the most used/backed fork.

https://github.com/brave/brave-core/pull/19476

They have much more changes than just compile flags. Here's the repo where they maintain their patch set: https://github.com/brave/brave-core/tree/master/patches

Brave Private Ads toggle controls just Push Notification ads at this time. So, if you are still seeing Push Notification ads, that would be incorrect. However, it's normal to still see New Tab Page image ads, and/or other ad formats. We are introducing a new UI that helps you better toggle on/off specific ad units, and removing the "Brave Private Ads" toggle that can be confusing: https://github.com/brave/brave-core/pull/18938

Yes, being fixed. Github at https://github.com/brave/brave-core/pull/18922

Brave has written their own (open source) adblock engine (in rust) that is directly integrated into the browser (ie. not an extension, so is not affected by Manifest V3).

https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust

Here is a (somewhat dated) article describing it by the authors:

https://brave.com/improved-ad-blocker-performance/

Brave has its own Rust implementation of an adblocker embedded in the browser: https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust; so it does not embed uBlock Origin (but the filters are mostly compatible)

Disclaimer: I work at Brave but not on the browser.

We support :has currently, which impacts many filters in EL and uBO. Some non-supported filters such as upward() can be manually converted over to use :has instead. The other unsupported procedual filters are a WIP will depend how easy/hard they are implement. No ETA, but have opened a ticket https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust/issues/293

ublock on chromium and brave itself can't use all of the filters in that list: https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust/issues/4

It's open source https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust

I've fixed this in the adblock engine as of https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust/commit/8a755bdb190bb55a3a3acee1e6507085051bdeec, and I'll push to get this patched in 1.47 soon. Thanks for the reports!