Brave's new adblock engine cuts memory usage by 75% across all platforms
Brave has overhauled its Rust-based adblock engine, cutting memory usage by 75% across Android, iOS, and desktop. With the default filter set, users see around 45 MB less memory use, and the savings increase for anyone who enables extra blocklists.
The team refactored the engine to store roughly 100,000 default filters in a zero copy binary format using FlatBuffers. It also switched some parts to stack-allocated vectors, reducing memory allocations by 19% and improving filter list build time by about 15%, while tokenizing common regular expression patterns improved matching speed by 13%.On desktop, sharing resources between engine instances saves about 2 MB per instance, and storage changes cut internal resource usage by 30%.
These improvements are available in Brave 1.85, with additional optimizations planned for 1.86, and Brave says the lighter built-in blocker should help battery life and multitasking, especially on mobile and older hardware, while remaining unaffected by Manifest V3.
- Web Browser
- Free • Open Source
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- Brave overhauls adblock engine, cutting its memory consumption by 75%Brave Newsroom • Official source
Comments
As Open-Source gets better the Big Industries will become more and more trying to compete with it.
Not a fan of Brave because their shady practices but hopefully this will help other ad blockers unless Brahe's ad blocker is already just still inferior but I don't know if it is or isn't.
It'd be interesting to know how this new native Brave adblock engine compare, resource usage-wise, to a relatively standard Chromium browser running uBlock Origin Lite or even Firefox running uBlock Origin. I'm not an expert but it is my understanding that Raymond Hill has put A LOT of work over the years into making both uBO and uBOL as efficient as possible