The Aside browser finally features a built-in ad blocker

The Aside browser now has a built-in ad blocker. It finally joins other popular browsers such as Brave, Opera, Firefox (on iOS), and Vivaldi to bring built-in ad-blocking without requiring any extensions.

Information about this was officially posted by the co-founder of the company on X. You can view the post attached below. It also contains a screenshot of where you can enable it and set it up.

The post clarifies that the ad blocker isn’t an MV2 extension, and that the native ad blocker is also highly customizable. You can add your preferred filters, and there’s an entire “Configure” submenu. The ad blocker is also advertised to be memory-efficient. However, we haven’t independently verified these claims at the time of writing.

To enable it, just head over to Settings and select “Security and Privacy.” The option to enable the feature should show up there.

So, what powers it? It’s not an entirely self-developed system. It uses Brave’s adblock-rust, which is cross-platform and open-source, as the base.

The developer further elaborated that the company did consider restoring support for Chrome MV2 extensions, and then using uBlock Origin as the built-in ad blocker for the browser. This is what browsers like Arc and Helium do. Ultimately, they didn’t go ahead with this idea. Instead, they decided to use Brave’s ad blocker system to power their native ad blocker.

One of the reasons why the Chrome MV2 extension was rejected is that keeping MV2 has a chance of potentially breaking the browser’s core, because it uses Chromium as the base. Chromium has already discontinued official support for MV2, so the implementation would’ve been uncertain and complicated.

Under the same thread on X, the co-founder also replied that some improvements are still pending.

Furthermore, he also responded to a user complaining about the speed.

In other Aside browser news, the stable Windows version of the browser is now available with almost full feature parity with the macOS version. More on that here.

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