Built-in adblocker Brave browser gets ’69 times faster on average’

The makers of the Brave browser say they have achieved an acceleration of an average factor of 69 in the processing of web requests. This by rewriting the built-in adblocker in the Rust programming language.

The reason for the switch, according to the browser makers, was that Brave could simply ‘go faster’ according to a study by Cliqz and Ghostery, a browser maker and the developer of the browser extension of the same name, respectively. This research was again done in the context of the Manifest V3 controversy, which is currently at play with the Chromium project. Although Brave is based on Chromium, it has nothing to do with it because web requests are filtered by the browser itself and not by an add-on.

In addition to the switch to Rust developed by Mozilla, the new adblocker uses a tokenization method, which is also used in uBlock Origin and Ghostery. The result is an average processing time per web request of 5.7 microseconds. More details about the process can be found in the makers’ blog post.

The rewritten adblocker is now available in the developer and nightly versions of the browser. That means that they will also come to the release version in the long term. The Brave browser is a project by Brendan Eich, former Mozilla president and the creator of JavaScript. The browser focuses on user privacy and rewards users with a cryptocurrency for watching privacy-respecting ads. Those coins can be given back to online content creators.