Because its considerably faster, they claim. https://brave.com/improved-ad-blocker-performance/ https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust

They rewrote ublock origin in rust, and its native to the product, not tacked on. Shady business model aside, they are making technical contributions to the world.

Brave for iOS is an ad-blocked browser. Maybe there are others, I know none.

It also auto-closes tabs I might have browsed in anonymous mode. Safari doesn't, and it's quite a nightmare to fatfinger into anonymous mode and see whatever you had opened anon mode for.

MobileSafari natively supports content blockers as well. You can turn them off temporarily or for a specific site. There's a variety of apps in the App Store that include block lists; just flip a switch in Settings similarly to how you'd add a new keyboard or autofill provider. The adblocker app doesn't get your browsing history, it just provides the list of blocked elements to Safari.

There are a (fairly small) number of use-cases where Chromium-like behaviour is needed (my 90% of the time browser is FF) but I don't want a browser that's reporting my every move back to Google. AFAIK Brave fits that need. And no, I've not opted in to their ad system since I hate ads anywhere and everywhere and want them all to die.

Chrome now has a gimped ad block API, brave is more flexible. It also comes with some anti fingerprinting measures and additional options.

uBlock Origin still works fine in Chromium today. Even if Google were to disallow it and other powerful adblockers, the alternative (similar to content blockers on MobileSafari) is not a serious problem, at least for me. I have Ka-Block! on my iPhone, which blocks ads just fine, despite having a much less powerful interface than uBO.

>uBlock Origin still works fine in Chromium today.

They intended to gimp the API. Not sure if the changes are in effect already though.

>Even if Google were to disallow it and other powerful adblockers, the alternative (similar to content blockers on MobileSafari) is not a serious problem, at least for me. I have Ka-Block! on my iPhone, which blocks ads just fine, despite having a much less powerful interface than uBO.

Good for you. It's not enough for me. I even write my own rules for the sites I visit often.

You can write your own rules for most Safari content blockers. But if I don’t trust websites not to invade my privacy, why would I trust a third party ad blocker that has access to my entire browsing history as opposed to the Apple method where the content blockers just give Safari a list of rules?

That's a very good point, but I have to say ublock origin has done nothing yet to breach my trust.

Don't all ad-blockers work with (regex-like) rule lists these days?

The difference is that ad blockers traditionally intercepted your web requests to block ads meaning they had both network access and access to your browsing history.

Content Blockers in Safari submit a list of rules to Safari and Safari blocks the requests. No third party has access to your browser history.

Note that Safari has added new APIs to allow for a content blocker to regain access to such information if you so choose.

Link?

Not that I don't believe you but I can't find any information

Does that let the extension intercept the browsing history or just allow the extension to get information about a page after the user pulls up the share sheet and chooses to send the page to the extension?

As I understand it, that delegate method is called whenever an extension rule matches something on the page.

That would be amazingly slow to call an out of process function on each match when the page renders. Extensions run as a separate process. I would be amazed if Apple would allow something that inefficient as careful as it is about battery and memory efficiency.

I mean, the Safari application is already doing XPC with the web content process constantly anyways. And perhaps they can batch these messages?

Why would Safari be doing any communication with the content blockers? The content blockers are submitting JSON one time to iOS Safari and aren’t running at all.

The Safari App Extension is running in the background, which is presumably what the process is communicating with.

You’re talking about MacOS and not iOS? As far I know, the only time Safari or any other app on iOS calls an extension is when the user chooses to “share” with that extension

Yeah, I think this API is only available on macOS. On iOS this would require keeping the extension alive in the background, which Apple seems largely opposed to allowing.

That's just macOS, not iOS, right?

I believe so.

> If you don't opt into it, why use Brave at all?

Sounds like you compiled a statement like "give me the factors of 26, but you can't use 1, 2, or 13." If you don't opt into it, you definitely aren't using it.

As for why someone would opt into it: some people don't mind being tracked but they care about who's doing the tracking and how their data gets integrated. If Brave shuts down everyone else's tracking but then Brave is building a profile on a user, that's fine for some.

> Sounds like you compiled a statement like "give me the factors of 26, but you can't use 1, 2, or 13." If you don't opt into it, you definitely aren't using it.

Parent comment said that the business model of Brave is opt in, implying that they’re recommending you use brave but not opt in to the crypto/ad business model. I think it’s perfectly fair to ask what is the value prop of Brave if you don’t use their crypto/ad system.

As far as I'm aware, Brave is the only browser that blocks ads by default. Personally I just use uBO/uMatrix on Firefox, but I can certainly understand why some people might prefer a more streamlined default experience.

The fact that so many people get bent out of shape about Brave blocking ads by default is probably also seen as a positive signal by many people who hate ads. If Brave pisses off people who run ad-supported websites, that's a fantastic endorsement.

I guess if you can’t figure out how to install uBO, then Brave makes sense. I suspect that the pool of people who care about blocking ads, can’t figure out uBO, but are willing to install an extra browser is pretty small, but I have no skin in this game.

I’ve never seen anyone angry about Brave blocking ads; what I’ve seen are people angry at Brave blocking ads and adding their own, which is a drastically different complaint.

Chrome+uBO isnt necessarily the better option, as far as raw performance.

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

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

Using Chrome+uBO+uMatrix and Brave side by side, Brave just works better. Less knobs to fiddle with, sane defaults. Sure I love the power of uMatrix, but it comes with its own time sink managing it. Brave, out of the box, performs correctly in most situations, and switching from default to blocking all cookies, javascript, and fingerprinting is only a click each (and thats the advanced mode.)

Now that’s a good argument.

Plus as far as their advertising goes (which I still think is pretty grey ethically to block ads and then show your own) its still privacy focused. If you opt into ads, you get OS notifications and they dont build some kind of profile of your behavior on their server. They send your client a list of ads, and your client knows which ads to show you, all targeting is local. Destroy your client, destroy the profile they have build of you. It might not be great, but they are clearly looking at advertising different than the rest of the marketing tech landscape, so kudos.

Theyve somewhat gone back to the juno/netzero/kmartbluelight internet model. If you did want to be subjected to ads, at least they are in a consistent place in the user interface, and not all over random pages breaking performance and scroll.

If I were forced to choose between two ads types, id pick Braves before the modern webs. Their product is like ad supported shareware. (The rest of the tipping and bat economy notwithstanding.)

Last I checked, the number of people using Adblock Plus dwarfs the number of people using uBO, so there's clearly a pretty large number of people who find uBO difficult, or perhaps simply don't know about it. Either way, I don't use it and wouldn't invest in that company either; I wouldn't bet on them succeeding in the long run. But I think can certainly understand, if not agree with, the people who decide to use it.

> I’ve never seen anyone angry about Brave blocking ads; what I’ve seen are people angry at Brave blocking ads and adding their own, which is a drastically different complaint.

I think for many people who hate ads, this distinction isn't really relevant. They like that Brave pisses off people who run websites with ads. Perhaps disliking website operators enough to cut off their nose to spite their face.

The difference between Adblock plus and uBO doesn’t affect my point. Most people are fully capable of installing an ad blocker, and tons do.

I guess I get people wanting to piss off those who run ads, but that applies to ad blockers as a whole. That’s not an argument for Brave specifically.

Well I can't defend it further than I have. It's not my intention to provide arguments for using Brave, merely to explain why I think many people have chosen to. You and I agree that Brave isn't the browser to use, but evidently plenty of people do want to use it and I think the reasons I've described explain a lot of that. I doubt it'd be causing so much consternation if that weren't the case.

For website and ad network operators, it could be worse. Automated 'clickfraud' extensions could have gained traction. Maybe Brave will do that in the future too.

FWIW, if you opt in, any profile that Brave builds (for ad matching purposes) never leaves your machine. You can inspect or delete it any time.

That's one part of the appeal — that this stuff stays local.

Brave is also a bit faster on older Windows computers.