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"... we applied EasyList to both the Alexa 5k, a curated list of the 5,000 most popular sites on the web, and a random sampling of 5,000 sites from the Alexa 1,
by pmoriarty 5y ago
"... we applied EasyList to both the Alexa 5k, a curated list of the 5,000 most popular sites on the web, and a random sampling of 5,000 sites from the Alexa 1,000,000 (ensuring no duplicate sites). Our measurement was in several steps:
1. Use Selenium and the DevTools Protocol to record every URL requested when rendering and executing a website.
2. Add additional automation to randomly select three distinct same-domain URLs from anchor tags on a page.
3. Used the above automation to visit the homepage of each site, and a maximum of three child pages, and recorded all URLs requested for images, script files, and other web resources.
4. Determine which of those URLs would be blocked by the version of EasyList fetched on that day, using Brave's optimized ad-block implementation.
...
We found that the vast majority of EasyList rules are not used when browsing popular websites; 3,268 of 39,198 (~8%) of network and exception rules were used during our crawls (these measurements exclude element rules)."
That doesn't mean that EasyList is not useful for browsing the rest of the internet.
- seoaeu 5y agoYeah, there are likely statistical methods you could use to estimate the number of stale rules, but "try the top 5000 and ~0.5% of the rest" isn't that
- LetsNotBeCunts 5y agoExactamundo bundo! It a solved problem to toss the bottom 10% of unused. Que es la problama?
- IgorPartola 5y agoAlso 8% of the rules could block like 99% of web traffic. But also notice the part where they went to 1m random sites too. That would be a sample from the rest of the Internet.