A Minimal QtWebEngine Web Browser with Adblocker

How Does It Work

This is a minimal network filter implementation using QWebEngineUrlRequestInterceptor and QtWebEngine, with AdBlock Plus compatible filters provided by easylist. The parser is currently based on ad-block from Brave, but alternatives might be needed in the future.

Reference:

• https://adblockplus.org/blog/investigating-filter-matching-algorithms
• https://brave.com/improved-ad-blocker-performance/

Dependencies

• Qt 5.10+ with QtWebEngine module

  On Debian or Ubuntu, this can be done by:

    sudo apt install qtwebengine5-dev qml-module-qtwebengine \ 
    qml-module-qtquick-window2 qml-module-qtquick2 qml-module-qtquick-controls2
  

• ABP-style parser from Brave's ad-block C++ library

  Checkout this repo:

    git clone https://github.com/penk/minimal-webbrowser-adblock
    cd minimal-webbrowser-adblock
    mkdir -p third_party
  

  Then checkout the following 3 repositories:

    git clone https://github.com/brave/ad-block.git third_party/ad-block 
    git clone https://github.com/brave/hashset-cpp.git third_party/hashset-cpp 
    git clone https://github.com/brave/bloom-filter-cpp.git third_party/bloom-filter-cpp 
  

  And copy all *.h and *.cc to third_party/ad-block:

    cp third_party/hashset-cpp/{*.cc,*.h} third_party/ad-block/
    cp third_party/bloom-filter-cpp/{*.cpp,*.h} third_party/ad-block/
  

Build Instructions

qmake DEFINES+=USE_ADBLOCK
make 

Copyright & License

Copyright © 2021 Penk Chen <[email protected]>

• This project is licensed under GPL 3+, see the file LICENSE for details.

• The Brave dependencies are licensed under MPL, which is unmodified and not included or redistribued in this project. It should be handled according to the Initial Distribution of MPL-licensed Files As Part Of an (L)GPL-licensed Project guidelines.