This discussion focuses on requesting a native background auto-update feature and individual "Update Now" buttons for custom content-filtering lists within Brave Browser.

Brave Feature Requests
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[Feature Request] Add Automatic Background Updates & “Update Now” Support for Custom Content Filtering Lists

Hello Brave Team,

First, thank you for building such an incredible, privacy-focused browser. The native Shields engine is fantastic, fast, and a core reason why so many of us rely on Brave daily. As a dedicated user who paid the one-time price for Brave Origin, I highly value the browser ecosystem you have built.

I am writing to formally request a feature enhancement and report a breakdown regarding the Content Filtering engine (brave://settings/shields/filters).

Currently, when a user subscribes to custom external filter URLs, Brave never triggers a background sync to update them. Furthermore, clicking the global “Update lists” button at the top of the page completely bypasses user-added custom lists. The only way to update custom entries is to manually toggle them off and on to force a cache refresh and redownload.

As a power user managing more than 10 custom filter lists, keeping these lists updated is critical. Because ad-block lists change rapidly to counter evolving web trackers, security threats, and site breakage, having these lists sit un-updated presents a pressing issue for maintaining an optimal browsing experience. This issue mirrors the limitations currently documented under open Brave GitHub Issue #26176.

Could this ticket please be routed to the Brave Shields/Adblock development team?

Proposed Feature Enhancements:

  1. Automatic Background Updates: Implement a scheduled background sync (e.g., every 24 or 48 hours) for user-added custom filter URLs, mirroring the behavior found in standard extensions like uBlock Origin.
  2. Individual “Update Now” Button: Add a discrete “Update” or “Refresh” button next to each custom list entry under the “Add custom filter lists” section.
  3. Global Support: Ensure the existing “Update lists” button at the top of the page forces a fetch for custom URLs alongside native components.

Implementing this would drastically improve the UX for power users and advanced communities who rely on specialized regional or community-driven blocklists. It would bridge the final functional gap between Brave Shields and traditional extension-based ad blockers.

Thank you so much for your time, dedication, and for considering this workflow improvement!

Best regards,

JasonBulnes

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Very well written request here! However, a few things to note:

So this already is how the feature works. Basically, these custom lists will update automatically based on the Expires field of that lists metadata. Further, the browser will attempt to fetch any available updates after one week (7 days) regardless of the Expires value (unless the field is > 7 days).

Just as an example, for this list:

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The browser will auto-fetch updates for it 9 days after the last update it received (or after the list was added). If this is not the case, then there is a bug that we would need to investigate.

This is actually already available – you should be able to see an Update now option in the overflow menu for the individual filter list(s):

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One last thing to consider that one of our Shields engineers mentioned when I was double-checking my understanding of how these lists fetch updates – going to quote them exactly here:

One more thing that’s out of our control is the raw file itself. This user mentions managing their own custom filter lists. There can often be a delay on github’s end with regards to updating raw files (usually less than 10 minutes though, but if he generated the raw file based off a commit and not a branch, it won’t update at all)

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Is there a way to auto update all raw files for the filter lists because when I do it manually using the update now button that’s in the extended options it lags the browser because I added 10+ filter lists to the custom filter list.