This year will see Waterfox shipping a native content blocker built on Brave’s adblock library - and it’s worth explaining what that means and why.
The blocker runs in the main browser process rather than as a web extension, which means it isn’t subject to the limitations that extension based blockers like uBlock Origin face. It’s faster, more tightly integrated, and doesn’t depend on a separate extension process or require us to constantly pull in upstream updates. Brave’s adblock library is also mature - it has paid engineers working on it, a wide filterset, and crucially it’s licensed under MPL2, the same licence as Waterfox, which makes it a natural fit. uBlock Origin, as good as it is, carries a GPLv3 licence that would’ve created real compatibility headaches.
For how it works in practice: by default, text ads will remain visible on our default search partner’s page - currently Startpage. The idea is that this is what will keep the lights on. ~~This mirrors the approach Brave takes with their search partner.~~
Users who want to disable that entirely can do so with a single toggle in settings, and it has nothing to do with any of Brave’s crypto or rewards ecosystem - we’re just using the adblocking library. Everyone else gets a fast, native adblocker out of the box, no extension required.
If you already use an adblocker, don’t worry, you can carry on using it. This will be enabled for new users or users who aren’t already using an adblocker.
In the meanwhile, Waterfox’s membership of the Browser Choice Alliance alongside Google and Opera, is pushing for fair competition and actual user choice in the browser market.
Waterfox is a fork of Firefox though, why would it face the limitations that chrome has?
Its directly integrated with the browser, plugin requires monitoring network requests and such to block through api, this is an extra abstraction so plugins would be slightly slower in comparison. It's not the limitations you are thinking about where chromium browsers have a more restricted API.
I think they was noting that because current blockers are extension-based, so Mozilla could break them or de-list them from their extension site at any time. By integrating this post-fork, Mozilla has no "kill switch" if they continue the enshittification route Google is taking, and break/remove these types of extensions for "security".
Adding to what others said:
Mobile browsers are very performance sensitive, compared to desktop. Adblocking extensions (in my experience) slurp battery, but native implementations use much less, hence other mobile-focused browsers (like Orion and Cromite) already tend to use native adblockers.
But it probably doesn't matter as much on desktop.
Using Firefox over Brave gives me 25% less performance on my desktop according to this benchmark site, and that's with an ad blocker on Brave and none on FF.
Firefox needs every CPU cycle it can get.
Take the benchmarks with a grain of salt.
...And even then, performance differences like that can feel trivial on modern desktops.
But yes. Even in some real world situations of mine (like text boxes with 50K+ words), I find FF extensions really bog it down.