Ad blockers for browsers are pretty important especially if you highly dislike getting bugged by all those ads you encounter in various websites. Google recently controversially outlined its Manifest version 3 proposal that seeks to prevent ad blockers from doing their jobs and therefore removing obstacles to their revenue from these ads. Brave, a Chromium-based browser said they have found the answer to handling ad-blockers through the Rust engine which has brought 69x average improvement in ad-blocking tech.
Brave was created by Firefox co-founder Brendan Eich and the Rust programming language was also something that he helped develop. They have replaced C++ with Rust (which also uses a C++ like language) and claims they have seen a massive improvement in the ad-blocking tech on their browser. Brave rebuilt their ad blocker and were inspired by two of the most popular ones – uBlock Origin and Ghostery.
What this new engine means is that they have cut the average request classification time to just 5.6 microseconds. If you can’t fathom how fast that is, it’s the equivalent of a millionth of one second. In other words, it’s very fast. If you’re an end-user, the micro improvements in the browser performance and the ad-blocking techniques may not be so obvious or significant, but experts say this does wonders to your computer’s main processor.
If you’re interested in the more technical aspects of this, you can read through the whole post on Brave. The engine revision that they are performing comes at a time when their Chromium foundation will be retrofitted with alternative APIs to make it more secure. This is due to the Manifest version 3 mentioned earlier but implementing this will come at a cost in terms of ad-blocking capabilities and browser speed.
