Cosmetic-Filtering.md

Our implementation of cosmetic filters tries to avoid hiding entirely first-party elements:

1. If its ID'ed with a well-known ad ID (currently google_ads_iframe_, div-gpt-ad, and adfox_), hide it.
2. If it has a first-party resource, don't hide it.
3. If it contains a third-party resource, hide it.
4. If it has more than 5 words of text in it, don't hide it.
5. Otherwise apply the filter and hide it.

See this test page.

cosmetic filtering API call:

        chrome.tabs.insertCSS({
          code: `${rule} {display: none !important;}`,
          cssOrigin: 'user',
          runAt: 'document_start'
        })

display: none !important fixes brave/brave-browser#3041

cssOrigin: 'user' fixes brave/brave-browser#4348 as follows:

By default, rules in an author’s style sheet override those in a user’s style sheet, which override those in the user-agent’s default style sheet. To balance this, a declaration can be made important, which increases its weight in the cascade and inverts the order of precedence.

so it’d be author > user > user-agent
!important sets it to
user-agent > user > author

the scenarios are as follows:
page doesn’t have !important: user stylesheet has !important (it looks like this overrides any elem that doesn’t have !important)
page does have !important: user stylesheet !important > author !important

spec: https://www.w3.org/TR/css3-cascade/#cascading-origins

Performance

CPU performance measurements:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IpNUU2nKehBndFUI2ERQbvwSmF00ZosbwYWDotAVAtQ/edit?usp=sharing

uBO: ~17% more CPU time (ms) than without
blanket injection method: ~4% more CPU time than without
mutation observer: 22% more CPU time than without

It needs to be determined whether the increased 4-5MB RAM usage is per tab or per frame.