Brave just dropped an update that should make anyone happy who’s tired of watching their browser eat up RAM like there’s no tomorrow. On January 5, 2026, the company announced it completely redesigned its ad-blocking engine, slashing memory consumption by an impressive 75%.
That translates to roughly 45 MB of savings by default across all platforms, Android, iOS, and desktop, and the number goes even higher if you’re running additional blocklists.
The update landed with Brave v1.85, and more optimizations are coming in v1.86. But what’s really interesting here isn’t just the number, it’s how they pulled it off. The engineering team migrated their Rust-based engine to FlatBuffers, a compact binary storage format that Google originally developed for gaming.
Instead of having around 100,000 adblock filters taking up space in conventional data structures like vectors and hash maps, everything now lives in an optimized zero-copy format that can be read directly without unpacking it into memory.
Performance tweaks that go beyond RAM savings
Beyond the FlatBuffers switch, Brave implemented a bunch of technical improvements that show they really meant business with this performance push.
Vectors are now stack-allocated instead of heap-allocated, which dropped memory allocations by 19% and sped up blocklist compilation by 15%. They also tokenized common regex patterns to boost filter matching performance by 13%, and optimized internal resource storage by 30%.
The results are noticeable: side-by-side comparisons between version 1.79 and 1.85 show memory usage dropping from 162 MB down to just 104 MB.
That’s not nothing, especially if you’re on a phone or an older laptop where every megabyte matters for battery life and overall system smoothness.
Why having a built-in adblocker actually matters
There’s something key that sets Brave apart from other browsers: its ad blocker isn’t an extension, it’s baked directly into the browser code. This means Brave’s privacy team can do deep system-level optimizations that would be impossible for extensions like uBlock Origin, which are limited by browser extension APIs and sandboxing.
And here’s the kicker: while Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers are dealing with Manifest V3 restrictions, which basically handcuff what adblockers can do, Brave stays completely unaffected because its blocker is native.
Shivan Kaul Sahib, Brave’s VP of Privacy and Security, explained that this update doesn’t just improve performance but also contributes to better battery life on mobile devices.
The work behind this came from Mikhail Atuchin, Pavel Beloborodov, and Anton Lazarev, who spent months refining the adblock-rust engine to hit these numbers. To benefit from these changes, you just need to update to Brave 1.85 and you’re good to go.
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