What does the built-in adblock block exactly?

Hello
My question is : what does the default part of the built-in adblock block exactly ? (What list ?)
You say you don’t block the acceptable ads but is it possible to block them if the user wants it ?
Does the default part of the adblock block mining (nocoin) ?
It seems all these infos are a kind of secret…
Thanks

Yes. I guess you can if you switch to aggressive blocking…

1 Like

Well for the other questions, I guess it’ll be better if I tag @Alice2095 @Kevin_cc @Jarc-1107

1 Like

I try ‘agressive’. I hope it doesn’t create problems with some sites
And I am waiting for the other questions
The user info is not very clear…
And thanks !

@fanboynz Tagging you as well since this is related to Ad - Blocking…

@Pierre771

Brave adblocker uses the same default lists uBlock uses, plus the ones specific to Brave, like brave-unbreak and all that.

The ones you can enable at brave://adblock are the extra filter lists you can fine here so nothing is going to be different from probably the most popular adblocker.

About nocoin Brave has uBlock filters – Resource abuse on by default, which is the one uBlock uses for that.
But they also have this list which would cover that and combine both lists nocoin.txt and nocoin-ublock.txt (since Brave doesn’t support !#include nocoin-ublock.txt which is a uBlock feature), but it doesn’t seem to be on the lists as default or regional lists, so it seems you have to manually add it to the adblocker to get it.

So, there is no secrets about it you can read the lists and find out what Brave allows or not, and you can force the blocking of allowed rules (most of the time) by using $important

Usually brave specific rules like brave-specific list is the one that has many things you might disagree with (brave-unbreak as well… any brave specific list, but specially this one), but the point is they audited those analytics and stuff and found out they weren’t malicious so they allowed it.

But yes, by default Brave is set to Standard, it blocks only does 3p network and cosmetic filtering. Aggressive will do 1p and 3p.

They split the blocking to avoid issues with some websites, that require their 1p whitelisted, without the using having to turn off all shields for that, but most of the problems are about 3p anyway.
Also the logic behind this, it’s that blocking 1p is not effective, you are walking right in their domain and you are giving so much information, they barely need any tracking from you anymore.
Of course, blocking 1p is also useful to unclutter and make the system not having to load some scripts and features that might use battery life and etc.

Feature wise, adblocker supports most uBlock Network filtering features, it still misses some like $redirect-url (and the important integer) $popup, $removeparam. which I would say are the most important to give the closer 100% compatible with uBlock lists.
And Brave supports $redirect btw, so I use that to give Brave adblocker almost 100% behavior compared to uBlock, by manually using $redirect instead of $redirect-rule until that is supported.

Brave supports all the snippets/scriptlet-injection filters from uBlock.

Brave doesn’t support Procedurals Cosmetics but it was confirmed as “coming soon”, which ones? we don’t know, but the most important will always be has(), has-text() and upward:(), and only that will cover most procedural cosmetics rules from uBlock lists.

Normal Cosmetics use native CSS selectors so all adblockers will support the same level of features there, but Brave also has support for style:() which I like to use a lot to modify pages and websites.
You have to remember cosmetics are useless for anything privacy or security, they only hide the elements, but they will add procedurals eventually and it will be great for the few pages that really need it, like using Twitter without an account.

So yes, it’s harder to know which features Brave really supports, not because of secrecy but because it is complex since they keep improving the adblocker, just going through the Procedural Cosmetics in uBlock is a lot, because many are there, but are not really useful for 99.9% of cases.
Brave is 100% open source, so, It’s not hard to research and test, unlike other big name chromium browsers, and find out how Brave compared to uBlock (or Adguard but Brave uses the same syntax and resources uBlock so that’s why it is easier to compare uBlock with brave)

So Brave seems to support most of the important features for blocking, and have really close compatibility with all the uBlock default lists, minor problems here and there and some unsupported features but nothing too serious. I still use uBlock and if I see uBlock blocking something, I manually check it and fix it myself, but the hopes is we won’t have to do that eventually, someday!

3 Likes

Thanks a lot for the answer !

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.