Matisyahu's Blog

Just checking out the latest Interop 2023 and it appears that Firefox development is advancing at a steady pace (link) such as the :has() CSS pseudo-class which has performance benefits particularly if you’re using content blockers that take advantage of it. It’ll be interesting to watch as the gap in functionality closes. This will become particularly important because Google has announced that their transition to MV3 is back on track (link) (link) but appears that they haven’t listened to the feedback. For starters, if you’re going to limit the number of filters then claim it is to avoid ‘regressions’, what benchmarks have they shown there will be regressions? at the moment the MV2 implementation of uBlock Origin is working quite fine with a total of 280,898 network filters and 241,518 cosmetic filters.

The reason why I am scpetical about the excuse is because if they had also announced that MV3 exntesions were coming to Chrome on Android then I might understand the need to have some sort of limits so that you don’t have devices with restrictive hardware specifications aren’t overwhelmed with having to load large sets of filters but alas there are no extensions coming to Chrome for Android. It reminds me of what someone wrote on the github discussion about increasing the limit on dynamic rules to 30,000 (link):

Just remove the limit on the number of rules. There is of course no need to have a limit and an arbitrary magic number is obviously always wrong since there is no way to prove that the choice is optimal or correct.

The limit is suspected to have been added by Google for anti-user purposes (enriching their ad business at the expense of the user by making ad blockers less effective), or was possibly added due to sheer incompetence.

I agree with the above sentiment that it appears to be an arbitrary limit or as someone else in the same conversation noted:

Has any consideration been given to letting the user choose limits for each extension?

Agreed – set those limits but allow the user, if they wish, to increase or remove the limit if they so wish through some ‘power user’ setting? Times like this make me happy that alternatives exist because eventually, if MV3 turns out to be as bad as what some extension developers claim, then one will need an alternative particularly if you depend on content blockers to make the web usable. Let’s hope that that things won’t be as bad as what is being claimed but given the tug of war within Google between the advertising division who is hell bent on screwing the consumer six ways from Sunday there are those on the service and product side who are passionate about technology but are let down by the advertising side of the business.

On a side note, I understand websites have to cover the cost of running the website and I’m more than happy to pay a subscription (of which I have quite a few) or disable ad blocking if they don’t have obnoxious ads that take away from the viewing experience. If you’re a website owner and find people are visiting your website with an ad blocker enabled then maybe you should ask yourself “what am I doing to cause this” rather than blaming ad blockers.