Heuristics can use information like parts of the url, context of the request (origin domain for example, or "request is coming from an iframe"), existence of third-party cookies, already detected page behavior, and so on. It also allows for updating the rules on the fly. Like if I allowed something, but it turned out to be a bad idea.
And Chrome won't allow the extension block lists to include regexps/wildcards, they all have to be FQDNs?
It seems reasonable to require a static list for privacy reasons. But not supporting pattern matching rules would seem to be an explicit attempt to stop ad blockers.
The privacy advantage is not giving extensions access to what domains you are browsing. The extension declares a static list but doesn't know what did/did not match.
Because if the extension knows what URLs you're accessing, and can send that data somewhere, that's a major privacy concern.
So this makes sense and seems good for privacy. But if it breaks uBlock Origin significantly, that seems like a very bad thing.
It’s a good theory, but it will still be possible to get an event for every single item that gets loaded. All they removed was the ability to block individual loads in that event. It is still entirely possible to collect that list of urls and snitch on the user.
