[ehsankia]

Except that list really is just bloated with rules that don't do anything anymore.

> We measure how EasyList affects web browsing by applying EasyList to a sample of 10,000 websites. We find that 90.16% of the resource blocking rules in EasyList provide no benefit to users in common browsing scenarios.

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.09160.pdf

They've also mentioned the possibility of tweaking the 30k limit.

[danShumway]

> in common browsing scenarios.

Part of the point of an adblocker is to protect you in uncommon browsing scenarios. This is almost like saying that a malware list is bloated because some of the hashes its storing are uncommonly downloaded. Having as close to full coverage as possible is important.

It also opens up an attack vector for advertisers that they absolutely will exploit. With unlimited rules, there's no reason for ad networks not to use a few domains and serve their ads from a few sources. With a hard limit, there's a strong incentive for networks to collectively try and flood the lists with tons of different domains until we run out of room to include all of them.

> the possibility of tweaking the 30k limit.

This has been the number one complaint about the proposal from day one. If at this point the Chrome team still hasn't decided to tweak the limit, I just don't see how there's not gonna be any new argument past this point that anyone can make to convince them.

[ehsankia]

Comparing it to a malware list is a bit extreme, isn't it? In one case, you actually get infected, in the other, you see one ad. Your next point about advertisers abusing it is a good one though.

I believe in the response, they said they are running benchmarks to see the performance hit, so they are definitely still looking at tweaking the limit.

[danShumway]

I don't think the consequences are the same, but I do think the underlying idea is applicable.

Two things to keep in mind:

A) uBlock Origin doesn't just protect me from ads, it also protects me from many trackers. I'm in the (maybe minority, I don't know) camp that says that excessive tracking and de-anonymization attempts cause people tangible harm. They're not as drastic or as harmful as installing malware on my computer, but I put these practices in the same category as a malicious attack.

B) Under the most recent stats I've checked, Malvertising has almost surpassed general unsafe sites like porn/torrents as a source of consumer malware. Even Google Ads aren't immune from some of these attacks[0]. So for less computer-literate friends that I have, I consider a gimped adblocker to be a malware risk source.

But to your point, maybe a less emotionally charged comparison could be Chrome's automatic whitelist for autoplaying videos. Nobody is going to die if a video autoplays on their tablet, but at a fundamental level the point of blocking autoplay is to actually block it, everywhere. Not to block some of it. People didn't want Google trying to guess which video sites were the most annoying, they just wanted Google to turn off autoplay.

In the same sense, if someone installs an extension that says it's going to block ads and trackers, I don't think it's unreasonable for a consumer to want it to block all of the ads (or at least as many as is possible to detect), not just some of them on the X most popular websites.

[0]: https://wp.josh.com/2019/05/06/breaking-news-google-adwords-...