The blocked page notification in Brave now is just a white page that tell you this website may track you and it only shows the blocked url. I think Brave can try to display which filterlist and rule caused the blockage too, it will be useful to see why is the page itself blocked for people who add their own custom blocklist to block contents.
@anon57438784 @fanboynz this is actually the first time I’ve seen this. Could either of you help explain a bit on how this works, in regards to why the site is blocked if Aggressively Block Trackers & Ads is on but if set to Block Trackers & Ads it will load? This is for ublock.org
But on top of that, does uBlock actually have something set to track across other sites?
@Saoiray
Aggressive does 1p and 3p.
Standard 3p usually with some 1p.
Technically blocking a document = 1p so that is what is happening here.
You can read how the concern was brought up in this issue:
Then there is this as a followup
and as you can see, the reason Anton is giving tell you it might not change anytime soon. I think it is the problem of balancing breaking the web and not be ‘scaring’ to the not so tech people, some websites are blocked for a lot of reasons, it doesn’t mean they are malicious by nature.
And yes, it would be good if Brave showed the reason why it was blocked, uBlock started doing that sometime ago.
But you can see Anton talking about it here https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/28386 and how it might change, at least the text but nothing else.
But it is super low priority stuff.
But yes, uBlock has the same, just they recently added the filter or filters blocking it.
I think this is what Anton is talking about, you see ‘following filter’ then automatically whitelist it and ignoring the reason why it was blocked, plus, it is technical stuff most people don’t need to see.
I wish it was added like chrome://flags/#brave-adblock-scriptlet-debug-logs meant for filter list maintainers/makers though.
But also Brave filter lists work different than uBlock, Default lists are made of ONE txt file with all the 130K rules on it.
1 Like
Why do they decide to include every rule in one list ? Won’t that also cause problems ? Brave’s default filter is trying to reproduce uBO’s default settings, but on Android uBO, the default list also included AdGuard – Mobile Ads to block more mobile ads so how do they fix something like that ?
Not really, in the end all lists have to be ‘merged’ internally for the adblocker to use them, so in terms of efficiency it should be the same, but if we think about updating the lists, probably, because of size on each update.
Each list.txt is around (based on latest) 4624kB, that means you have to download that often, especially now where somehow lists keep getting updated too frequently…
in 9 hours it got updated on my side 5 times, so it can be ‘heavy’ for having so many lines of text.
There are many things Brave team is doing to optimize things, and I hope they touch the whole updating of lists.
Like how Brave is still using two separated Adblock engines for the lists too, so regional and custom lists and rules are different from default ones, so they have to work eventually to optimize that too.
About Mobile, well, you have to remember FanboyNZ is the ryanbr from easylist, he works for Brave and people have to report ads and all and he can fix them either in Easylist or Brave lists and he will talk to uBlock if needed.
So if ads get reported on mobile he will fix them.
I mean, usually desktop rules and mobile rules should either be the same or don’t interfere if they are added.
Properly made websites will just adapt screen resolutions and keep elements named the same, so building unique mobile versions is a waste of time.
But then Network requests and Scriptlet Injections. should be the same.
What might change a little are Cosmetics, but first, cosmetics don’t add anything in privacy, so I wouldn’t worry about them, they only hide things, but in that case, most of the time classes and IDs and selectors, shouldn’t change as much just for being ‘mobile’. and if they change, like if on desktop something is called .sidebarAds and on mobile they don’t use sidebar but display an ad in #bottomAds, that means it will not really affect anything, since adblocker will act according if the elements exist, so same or different, I doubt something will break only for being mobile or desktop.
Also, I can imagine one of the reason why Adguard mobile ads exist in uBlock is because uBlock is not focusing on mobile, gorhill is not building uBlock with mobile in mind, if it works is because it can be loaded, but he will not optimize uBlock for mobile.
So my guess is that by adding a mobile specific list he is kind of like washing his hands and hoping that improves mobile adblocking but doesn’t mean brave can’t just keep adding Android specific rules if needed, just like they do already with iOS.
Or how Brave already adds the list to block ‘install app’ banners and all that for mobile.
The list doesn’t look like it has anything impressive, just some specific stuff for Adguard that will not work in Brave anyway, but trying any ||domain^ all random 30 I tested were dead.
1 Like
Raised the concern about size of the file, not because efficiency, should be the same being in different files or single file, but re downloading 4.51MB file for rules that are not relevant for most people every 2 hours is crazy.
They still haven’t changed the time to 2 hours on stable, but since updates on lists happen every once in a while, then that will create a whole new version of the file to be pushed.
Like they changed something that started making more versions of files, and then plus the 2 hours, will mean a new file every 2 hours, since it is impossible to imagine 19 lists not updating at least once in the span of 2 hours.
But for example all uBlock lists had almost 60 commits yesterday, many for the same rule, not all different, but lets say 60 individual rules, for sites that 99.9% of people don’t use, yes, updates are important but I will get an update of 4.51MB soon, for just 1 or 2 changes.
So I raised the concern, I was already lowering the file to 3.38 MB for all the lists taht shouldn’t have been pushed as an update… of course I stopped there, since it was getting too long.
But guess what? now I got a new update, once again, full 4.51 MB for only:
1 Like
Ok, they have been working on it, they will push eventually an update in the server component that will only do differential updates, so it will be 1.64 KB the lines that got added and modified in the screenshot I posted vs 4.51MB. 
So that’s good to hear for ya all. I could work around it by making default lists custom, so I didn’t have issues with it, but I know Brave haters and weirdos would find it out and complain how is possible Brave downloading 4.51MB every 2 hours.
1 Like