Add blocker for Brave App

[Ledermeister]

Hello everyone,

want to ask how i can activate the ad blocker for the Brave mobile app.
For example the ad blocker for the youtube ads is not working.
Thank you for your support!

best regards
Leder

[SmartyAadi]

If the brave icon looks coloured as below,

it indicates that ad blocking is on. You can click on the brave icon and check if shields is up.
Shields Up → AD block on
Shields down ->ad block off

Also try to turn shields off and turn it on to see if that helps.

[LauraTab]

I have to add that even if is set to ON, some sites still have some tricky new page click on their screen.
Example, watch a video, and want to forward 10seconds, when touch the screen, there is a new tab opened with some ad.
any suggestion?

[SmartyAadi]

Maybe try with aggressive shields.

[LauraTab]

Advanced controls all set to (aggressive ).
Brave shields & privacy all to (aggressive ) respectively and still some sites can open a new tab with the ad(even if i block new tabs).
I won t share the site, unless is requested to try.

[anon57438784]

@LauraTab Brave Adblocker doesn’t support $popup which is what filter lists usually use to ‘stop popups’, which doesn’t stop anything, the popup is still allowed to popup and then the $popup would close it because it uses window.onclose for that. That’s why I never liked using $popup.

But Brave can do that in other ways, just not compatible with uBlock or Easylist filter lists, which is what people expect. Brave wanting feature parity with uBlock is to support the lists, but technically speaking Brave already can do everything uBlock does, but since they are not used in a list, they are not used by Brave.

1. There is an exact $popup alternative that also uses window.close() to close the window; It is a scriptlet called window-close-if, again, since it is about close() then the popup is allowed and closed.

2. But there one that uses window.open() to stop the popups completely nowoif / window.open-defuser so depending on the situation you will be able to stop completely the popups or do the same $popup does.

So, Brave can block them if you create the workarounds, but by default Brave will not do it until Brave doesn’t support $popup rules.

I know sometimes some popups and ads are seen because of other unsupported features like denyallow or strict1p/3p, but I have seen that very rarely.

The biggest issue I have found in Brave in movie, anime or manga pages, is how some scripts are blocked with Regex, so they can be blocked in a similar way because they all look the same (just different domains), but the problem with that is that some regex rules from uBlock lists are unsupported because RUST doesn’t support features uBlock lists maintainers used, like are the lookarounds (?=) or (?!), since the problem is how RUST doesn’t support and doesn’t want to support them, then Brave can’t do much, they could but who knows how good or not it’s like to try another regex crate or something that will add support for the lookarounds and other unsupported features, and who knows if it is even efficient and good enough. Regex are already really bad to use in general, especially when Brave uses a lot more memory for having them in the list (not even being used).
So the best way in that case is to report each website and then add each domain one by one to the list and forget about the unsupported regex.

So the workarounds exist to stop popups, or to stop the script making the popup.

But It is better if you report that site with the problems and you use the ad-blocking category in your post so it can be fixed.

PS. There is another way to block popups but I don’t consider it viable because it would currently cause issues in Brave. It is by using CSP which also has popup blocker with sandbox directive.
The problem is, if you run a page or iframe sandboxed, the adblocker will not work there, so you would have to use CSP script-src to block the same scripts Brave would normally block in those pages.
Brave is already aware of that issue, where adblocker doesn’t work when the sandbox is used, but who knows when it is going to be fixed.
So for the moment using CSP to block popups is not an option, unless you want to complicate things more.

[LauraTab]

@Emi

So the best way in that case is to report each website

Actually , there are multiple sites , that seems to use this “technique”, but i captured their first “redirect” domain name which is redirects to dynamic url.
Weird is, if i access directly this redirect url the browser blocks directly the content(but in working when is used as redirect.)
This is the first URL that appears in redirects(fsplayer.online/out.php), tricky domain name as well.
P.S Outstanding explanations @Emi ! Thank you!