An ad and tracker blocker built into the engine, not bolted onto it

Every ad blocker you have used is an add-on. It only gets the page after the browser has already read it, so it has to hide the ad after the fact -> which is why ads flash into view and vanish, and why a site can tell a blocker is running by looking for the traces it leaves behind. Floati's is part of the engine. A blocked request never opens a connection, and a hidden ad slot never gets a space on the page in the first place, so there is no flash and nothing to find. On a test page with two ad slots, the page went from 589 pixels tall to 347 with no gaps left behind. It reads the standard filter lists everyone else uses. EasyList and EasyPrivacy together are about 116,000 blocking rules and 24,000 hiding rules, and the browser downloads them on request rather than shipping a copy that goes stale. Deciding on a request takes about five microseconds, so a page making hundreds of them pays about a millisecond in total. There is also one thing it does that no blocker built on the reference browser can do. Trackers now hide by borrowing the site's own address: the tracker on a shop's page is no longer called something recognisable, it is called something like metrics.theshop.com, which looks like part of the shop and appears on no list. Seeing through that means asking the network what the name really points to, and a browser add-on is not allowed to ask. Floati is the browser, so it can. Honest measurement: probing fifty large retail, airline and bank sites found the lists already name most of these, and one that they did not. Small, but it is a hole nothing else on the reference browser can reach into. Settings now shows what is loaded, what was blocked on the page you are looking at, and which rule did it, because a number with nothing behind it is a number you have no reason to believe.