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Here's what's happening to ad blockers in Google Chrome (and other browsers) (www.spacebar.news)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (3 children)

What a garbage article. Chock full of google propaganda and fear mongering.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago (2 children)

What specifically is "google propaganda and fear mongering" in the article?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Mentions UBlock seems.to be fast and safe, but that the API used lets extensions look at everything you do amd can dramatically affect browser speed. Implying that UBlock Origin is responsible for Chrome being such a memory Hog and that they, not Google, are the ones after your data.

[–] Deebster 28 points 5 months ago

That performance cost seems to be negligible in uBlock Origin and other popular ad blockers that have focused on optimization [...], but there were probably other extensions not doing that well.

The article goes out of its way to not do what you're accusing it of. I don't understand how you've managed to read the article as having the opposite slant as what it actually does.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago

Except the part where it didn't imply that at all?

That performance cost seems to be negligible in uBlock Origin and other popular ad blockers that have focused on optimization (uBO has an explainer wiki page), but there were probably other extensions not doing that well. It’s not hard to see a situation where multiple poorly-optimized extensions installed using the Web Request API could dramatically slow down Chrome, and the user would have no way of knowing the issue.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I don’t think that’s necessarily the case: Google knows as well as I do that a total crackdown would give governments like the European Union and United States more ammo for antitrust lawsuits.

They do not care, never have, never will. Cost of operation.

It would also be a motivator for more people to switch browsers, which would weaken Google’s browser monopoly.

Not enough even care that would make noticable difference in market share.

A lot of people were upset 23 years ago when Windows ME removed real mode DOS, too.

And they all stopped using it, right? Right?

The new Declarative Net Request API is still a downgrade in capability compared to the older API, but the feature gap has closed significantly.

Chrome now allows extensions to include 100 rule lists, with up to 50 lists active at once. There are also additional filtering options, including an option to have case-insensitive rules, which cuts down on duplicates in filter lists. The maximum number of filter rules now varies by use case — an extension can now have up to 30,000 dynamic rules (filters downloaded by the extension) if they are deemed as “safe” (block, allow, allowAllRequests or upgradeScheme), an additional 5,000 other types of dynamic requests, and more filters included in the extension package.

for context, EasyList is just one of the lists enabled by default in uBlock Origin and other ad blockers, and it has over 75,000 rules.

Can you math? Feature gap almost same as before.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That's up to 30K dynamic rules, at least 30K static rules, and at least 1K regex rules: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/declarativeNetRequest#property-GUARANTEED_MINIMUM_STATIC_RULES

That seems like it's fine for general use, and those limits might go up again. EasyList and the other big lists can be consolidated to varying degrees with Chrome's rules format, and there's probably some dead rules in there. uBlock Origin on Firefox will definitely be more versatile moving forward, but every time I've used uBlock Origin Lite in Chrome it's almost the same experience.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Why even make limit at all? Should not have any.

EasyList and the other big lists can be consolidated to varying degrees with Chrome's rules format

Source? Or you just assume they can? What about specific list? List by small maintainer?

Not convinced feature gap any better yet just by slightly higher number and not said real number and vague „can compress list“.

Also, until Hill say satisfied with api or proven it enough to fight google head on in adblock war, not think good enough.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

Seemed pretty level headed and surprisingly well written to me.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

What’s Google?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago

A misspelling of googol, which means 10^100^.