[HN Gopher] Brave overhauled its Rust adblock engine with FlatBu...
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       Brave overhauled its Rust adblock engine with FlatBuffers, cutting
       memory 75%
        
       Author : skaul
       Score  : 109 points
       Date   : 2026-01-05 17:34 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (brave.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (brave.com)
        
       | bqmjjx0kac wrote:
       | I'm not sure how impressed I should feel about saving 45 MiB
       | these days.
        
         | mhitza wrote:
         | 45MiB is for the default adblock setup, and it scales with the
         | more block lists you have enabled.
         | 
         | I'll happily take performance improvements cause most products
         | lack any efficiency care nowadays.
        
         | timeon wrote:
         | > these days
         | 
         | Are you referring to current RAM prices or bloat of numerous
         | Electron apps?
        
           | nomel wrote:
           | A $130 Motorola smartphone has 8GB of RAM. This will save
           | 0.5% RAM. It's fairly negligible on modern systems.
        
             | formerly_proven wrote:
             | 130USD for 8GB RAM will be a good price for a bare DIMM in
             | two weeks.
        
             | Retric wrote:
             | These days you're getting 4GB at that price point and
             | you're losing memory to the OS thus user space memory is
             | even more constrained.
        
             | Bombthecat wrote:
             | Smartphone producers already announced to cut ram this
             | year... Just FYI
        
             | devwastaken wrote:
             | 4GB of that taken by the system. more memory use with
             | runtimes also means more cpu to track and free memory.
        
             | moscoe wrote:
             | Now multiply that across all
             | apps/services/extensions/profiles and it adds up.
             | 
             | This kind of lazy thinking is why today's software is so
             | bloated and slow.
        
         | allarm wrote:
         | Very.
        
         | infogulch wrote:
         | Adblock data is accessed on every request; so this is 45 MiB of
         | _cpu cache_.
        
       | nicoburns wrote:
       | Brave's adblocking engine is a neat example of open source and
       | the ease of sharing lbraries in Rust. It uses Servo crates (also
       | used by Firefox) to parse CSS and evaluate selectors, and is then
       | itself published as a crate on crates.io where it can be pulled
       | in by others who may want to use it.
        
       | ComputerGuru wrote:
       | Is that 45 MiB per-tab? People are laughing it off, but since
       | each tab is a process these days..
        
       | nosman wrote:
       | I hope that this is the start of developers being conscious of
       | using resources efficiently again, especially in the browser.
       | 
       | The more rust gets written, the better AI will be able to write
       | it for people... I like to be optimistic.
        
         | lifetimerubyist wrote:
         | The adblocker was already written in Rust.
        
       | dmix wrote:
       | I just found out Brave supports Vertical tabs,
       | https://brave.com/blog/vertical-tabs/
       | 
       | I might have to try switching from FF...
        
         | apparent wrote:
         | Do they support nested tabs? Makes visually navigating many
         | tabs so much easier that way.
        
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       (page generated 2026-01-05 23:00 UTC)