Easylist goes by the recommendations for Adblock Plus - use specific filters and avoid regular expressions. This allows the filter list to be processed very fast. And the whitelisting entries are mostly due to the fact that some sites started to serve regular content through known advertising sites.

Have a look at the Filterset.G whitelist (http://pierceive.com/filtersetg/whitelist-beta/) - now that’s scary…

The EasyList is fairly aggressive because users want it that way … and “yes” there will be an occasional ‘burp’ in what it blocks. But considering the amount of users the EasyList has, problems have been very minimal at best and false-positives have been addressed NOT mainly through whitelisting, but rather through a rewrite of the filtering strings.

You wrote:
“Evidence that the creators know of its greedy nature is their inclusion of a 20+ item whitelist to manually compensate what was initially blocked.”

The irony of your statement is that your first proposed filter string:
/(\b|_)ad(x|s?)(\b|_)/
…is EXACTLY why about 80% of those whitelist strings exist. Most of the whitelistings are for video players served thru an “ad” string. The whitelists allow the player to function correctly on some very MAJOR sites without having to remove the broader generic filter strings like */ads/* or *//ads.*. And I don’t have to whitelist the ENTIRE page. The EasyList works quite well this way. Try watching news video at FoxNews, MSN, Forbes, etc with just that one filter string that you proposed …. you will have a whitelist larger than mine with just that one string.

You wrote:
” … resulting in occasional broken pages and/or pages that dead-end because adblock has removed the “Next” button.”

I don’t know what ‘next’ button you are talking about. Things like this could occasionally happen, but I currently have no reports of any big problem with things like that … and if someone did have a problem, I would hope that they would bring it to my attention. These things are usually fixed as fast as I can fix them when they occur. Trying to keep pages free of ads without interrupting a user’s surfing experience is no small task … but I love doing it and devote a lot of my time to it. :-)

ps: Adblock Plus does NOT have a problem with large filter lists as long as they follow the simple expression ’shortcut’ rules. So using string totals is irrelevant to ABP’s operation. I increased the filter size because it does not take any noticeable performance hit.

Sincerely:
rick752 - ABP EasyList/EasyElement author.