> Brave has been in the business of blocking ads for a long time. Surprisingly it took them years to come up with cookie banner blocking, even though all they do is include a list maintained for free by easylist maintainers.
Brave has been sponsoring Fanboy's work as an Easylist maintainer since early 2019 via an employment contract. This "list maintained for free" you're talking about was originally "Fanboy's Cookie List" and was promoted into Easylist as of November 2019 [1].
> This could have been implemented already 2 years ago without much effort.
Indeed, it was available through the brave://adblock settings menu 2 years ago. Building a new filter list is really difficult though - not only do you have to cover enough websites for it to be useful, but you have to make sure that important functionality doesn't break when it's applied. Multiply that by approximately every website on the internet and you'll have some idea of how difficult it is.
The list is finally comprehensive enough to be rolled out to a much wider audience - which is exactly what we're doing.
> People have asked to have the uBO-functionality ported to the built-in Brave Shields, including cosmetic filtering, and granular control.
Not sure what you are referring to here, but we do have cosmetic filtering and the ability to add custom filters or subscribe to anyone else's list with auto-updates. Procedural filtering is the main missing feature, but I'm actively working on that.
[1]: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/commit/f479000932294df0...