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You know, I *really* dislike ad blockers from the security perspective. They need exceptionally broad permissions that make the extension a juicy target for attacks. Pop one of the maintainers' Google or Github accounts and own hundreds of millions of people overnight - their email, bank accounts, social media identities, and all that.

The consequences of simple coding errors are similarly disastrous - and I bet that there are some good UXSS bugs lurking in all that JavaScript.

For these reasons, I resisted ad blockers for 20+ years, and I endured countless cookie prompts, subscription interstitials, "sponsored results", and unskippable ads. But around 2020, the anti-user patterns on the web have gotten unbearable. And I say this as a person who grew up in the era of auto-playing Flash-based pop-under ads.

I'm not a security absolutist. It's all about trade-offs: the convenience of using a modern web browser, for example, generally outweighs the risks of living with its massive attack surface. But in the case of ad blockers, you gotta take a hit just to continue to browse in peace. It blows.