I said it for Waterfox and I'm gonna say it again for Firefox: this is good. At worst, it's just fine (Mozilla just uses it internally to replace or supplement its old and incomplete Tracker Blocking system, which never gets the same scrutiny).

The biggest difference between Firefox and Waterfox in implementation is the WaterFox developers noticed this FF change early, and committed to providing full-fledged ad blocking out of the box, which is great news for users.

A few more reasons this is good:

1. Rust is faster than JavaScript
2. Native functionality is faster than an extension
3. Actual ad blocking is something Firefox users have been begging Mozilla to do

A built-in ad blocker is easily the least problematic announcement coming out of Mozilla in the last year.

As long as it doesn't interfere with Ublock Origin I guess that's fine.

"Quietly™" by posting about it beforehand everywhere they could.

Cool.

Still sticking with uBlock and SponsorBlock (skips all the "this video was sponsored by" segments on YouTube).

Of course they just had to make it somewhat contreversial by adopting braves adblock engine; brave's ceo or whatever funds anti gay lobbyists.

Quietly

The developer made this change from a personal laptop at their local public library.

Shhhhhh.

As someone whose employer blocks the installation of browser extensions, I am more than excited to hear that!

Using the web sucks since that policy has been implemented a year or so ago.
Integrated adblock engine would rectify that again.

That's cool, take the good part of Brave, leave behind the villainous CEO and dodgy crypto scams

They didn't include this in the release notes? What in the world is going on?

I don’t think it’s as good as uBlock Origin.

It would be really nice too if they implemented Brave's fingerprint randomization, which is obviously not perfect and I'm never going to expect Tor like anonymity, but is far better than most other browsers. Where Mullvad and Tor try to make everyone look the same, Brave randomizes nearly every important fingerprint.

And I know Firefox does this pretty well already, but from the research I did, Brave's fingerprint vector randomization is another level.

Huh, right after Waterfox started to implement it themselves. Must have spooked Mozilla. I don't see how using Brave's adblock engine is all that different from uBlock Origin though since they both just enforce DNS lists, right? Could be wrong, I know nothing about how adblocking works on the backend, lol

That's a good thing.

Brave's native adblock is the best.

a default-disabled prototype

No wonder it didn't show up in normal/enduser release notes.

This article suggests you have to disabled Enhanced Tracking Protection to test it. Does it replace that entire system with an equivalent system?

I'll wait until it's stable and productive.

Why did they not just set ublock as a default installed plugin?

If we are going to eschew open source projects from shitty tech companies, then there’s a pretty long list.

This can be the main reason:

Mozilla: Anthropic’s Mythos found 271 security vulnerabilities in Firefox