Why not have a content blocker with much higher limits? If security is the aim why the limit for 50000 filter rules in use at one time?
If the 50k limit isn't sufficiently high, I don't think, "they're trying to restrict blockers, but don't worry they're bad at it" is a great defense. And if the 50k limit is high enough, and it's a reasonable tradeoff between privacy and performance, then why are content blockers putting in extra work to bypass it?
Should we expect that Apple will block the limit workaround in the future?
Without a limit, developers would probably default to a massive append-only list that takes a minute to compile.
With a limit, developers have to shard their rules which lets them at least compile them in parallel. For example, you need to recompile the list if you want to support on-the-fly customizations like "whitelist this site."
> when Apple rolled out the new Content Blocker API, it enforced a maximum limit of 50,000 rules for each new extension that wanted to block content inside Safari.
Check again? You're probably thinking of how classic extensions used to work.
Eventually more rules will cause a performance impact.
Ads tend to have far higher performance and power consumption impact than this. Do Safari or Chrome force downscaled pictures and videos on you because it's faster? How is any other software "limited" for performance? And if this is a performance issue then why a fixed limit instead of one that varies with your system's performance?
Edit. HN is "hinting" at me that a developer setting arbitrarily low limits "for performance" and not allowing a change is reasonable and expected. Strange place to be told that manufacturer defaults are sacred and the "advanced settings" checkbox should be abolished. For performance, stability, all that. :)
The elegant solution would be to start with a sensible preset for your device, allow you to change it if you want, and then warn you if some noticeable delays are detected. IE used to do this with addon loading.