More complete support of Adblock net filters

[gorhill]

As of today, HTTPSB parses and enforces over 75% of ABP's request-blocking filters, or nearly 90% if not counting whitelist filters. Do whatever can be done to improve ABP-filters coverage.

Also, I cleared my misunderstanding of ABP's whitelist filters: I had assumed these were strictly for so-called "acceptable ads", while their only purpose [in EasyList, EasyPrivacy, etc.] is to un-break specific pages which are broken by ABP-blocking filters (The "acceptable ads" filters are in another standalone list, which is not and will never be supported by HTTPSB - because I believe the only acceptable ads are one the ones the user himself/herself decides to allow, not what a 3rd-party decides based on that 3rd-party's own definition).

[gorhill]

With EasyList + EasyPrivacy, the filter support coverage as of writing is 84.5%, and with support of whitelist filters, it would be 87.9%.

The domain option appears to be the currently unsupported one which is most used (third-party, now supported, was the most used).

I think v1.0 should support whitelist filters (which purpose is to unbreak web sites), but for now I don't see it as an emergency to further extend coverage.

I want the ABP filtering engine to grow sanely (i.e. priority is CPU and memory efficiency), so I rather take my time for support of the statistically less common filtering cases.

[gorhill]

Alright, I want to be done with this one before v1.0.

[gorhill]

Currently standing at 97.8% coverage with local changes. Discarding $popup option, I don't see it documented there. The site reported in #262 works properly now with the extended coverage.

Now analyzing impact on performance. Appears that the number of visited filters per URL is still low on average (~8).

Regarding the $popup option, this is what I've found:

https://adblockplus.org/development-builds/experimental-pop-up-blocking-support

[gorhill]

Thanks for the link.

So I understand that filters with this option are on the same level as element hiding filters, it's just that they apply to popup windows (chromium has a built-in popup blocker) rather than DOM elements, i.e. they are not to be used to block net requests, which is the primary purpose of HTTPSB.

So if I discard $popup the same way I discard element hiding, that should give HTTPSB a coverage of net request-based ABP filters quite close to 100%. I will measure and write down the result here later.

Edit: 99.7%. Good enough for v 1.0.

[gorhill]

Because of this https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-pluss-effect-on-firefoxs-memory-usage/comment-page-1/#comment-11173, I think a companion extension to handle strictly element hiding filters is more and more tempting, given how ABP is unoptimized with its handling of element hiding filters -- though I would have to check that the statement also applies to ABP on Chromium.

... or to Adblock (without Plus) which might handle it in a different way.

I understand your stance to create a companion extension which handles element hiding. On the other hand, I still think - if you find a lean and better way how to do it compared to ABP - that most HTTPSB users would prefer to have it in one place rather than installing an additional extension.