this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2026
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isn't ublock's filtering compiled to webassembly?
seems a bit dangerous though to risk for a browser with so small market share
From my unprofessional glance ar their repository, it uses a little, but not much. Take a look at their code; all or most of the filtering is done in JavaScript, the webassembly appears to be just ~~one~~ two modules. (It's in the "wasm" folder near the top of the list).
(Edit: I was looking at outdated code; the newer version uses more, but IMO pales in comparison to the JavaScript filtering logic)
Waterfox has a much smaller market share and much smaller budget, and was able to clear this with search partners just by promising not to block ads on them by default.
my point is not actually about search providers, but more generally websites intentionally breaking support for gecko based browsers. waterfox itself is too little, most developers don't even know about it I think. but firefox is the flagship/reference gecko browser, with more of a measurable number of users. if they implement a good ad blocker in the base browser, that could discourage advertising related sites from serving/supporting this browser.
brave is different in that it uses chromium, which the sites just happen to support already because of chrome. but firefox support is often not a priority even today
Dunno if I can name a time it was ;)
I guess it might be a priority for Mozilla sometimes
It was 16 years ago
:’(
The slow thing usually is the DOM manipulation anyways.
They should have built it in years ago, but called it "web security filtering" or something and included only a basic security blocklist, but left it easy to add other lists.
still it wasn't blocking ads, and even I as a poweruser was not aware that I could add externally maintained ad blocklists
especially using a brave adblocker, which i noticed doesnt block most ads, and likely whitelists some of them.
that probably depends on the blocklists used, like with ublock