YouTube launched in 2005 and was bought by Google in 2006. It has been a Google service for 95% of its existence. I'm pretty sure Google did other stuff in that 18 years than "put in more ads."

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.

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If you like this article, please consider following the site on Mastodon/Fedi, email, or RSS. It helps me get information like this out to a wider audience :)

If you like this article, please consider following the site on Mastodon/Fedi, email, or RSS. It helps me get information like this out to a wider audience :)

The article talks about Firefox too.

Adblock users are still a statistical minority of web users. Most people don’t care (as evidenced by Netflix’s ad tier gaining subscribers every quarter) or don’t know those extensions exist.

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.

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

I wrote about this a few months ago: https://www.spacebar.news/steam-time-bomb/

I mean, there's a difference between not reading an article, and several people arguing back and forth over the article that none of them have read. Reddit and Lemmy people do a lot of the latter.