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by dwaite 1859 days ago
> Sure you might run a tiny risk.

Having a third party monitor and inject code into every page I visit on the internet or intranet means you are trusting the browser extension as much as you are trusting the browser manufacturer themselves.

The popularity of content blocking means the evaluation of lists of hundreds of thousands of rules on every page request becomes a significant source of slower page load speed. It is not surprising that the browser makers would try to add highly optimized, native code to execute these lists.

1 comments

>Having a third party monitor

If you install an extension that shares your browsing habits then that is on you of course but good ad-blocking extensions doesn't do that and if the data doesn't leave the extension it isn't really monitoring you. I would personally trust the author of uBlock Origin and the in-built uBO made lists over Safari and Chrome any day. Both Apple and Google are running advertisement services so I don't see any reason to ever put any trust in them doing what is best for the user in blocking ads. I wouldn't really trust Mozilla that much either come to think of it.

>hundreds of thousands of rules on every page request becomes a significant source of slower page load speed

This is a myth really. Almost all websites the average user visit have some form of advertisement and/or tracking. Such sites load much faster with any good and modern ad-blocker installed. Besides, it is not like any developer worth his salt would run through hundreds of thousands of URLs looking for a match. The only time it does add any overhead is on a site with nothing to block at all and the amount is tiny compared to the time wasted on all the other sites.