There’s a hard limit for the maximum number of characters used by the URL masks (8K or something?) and, more importantly, the masks are checked one by one, so having so many masks (and most of them with * wildcards, which are expensive to process) could also really slow down your browsing.
The feature was never intended to be used with so many masks (there’s also no official “import” feature).
We may revisit this in v7…
Well, I have the same list on Eset and it works just fine, without slowing my browsing experience. If Avast had a hard limit on maximum number of characters, why didn’t Avast specific in their antivirus application? Even if there is no official “import” feature, anyone with a macro program can enter the same amount of url address, that is not an excuse.
I don’t think anyone is making “excuses”, just giving explanations. Looked like you where trying to use it as some extensive ad blocker, it is not really for that. It is already limited by the fact it is connected to the Webshield so it can not block SSL. Could the site blocking feature improve? Yeah, of course it could. Maybe it will. It is what it is as of today, though. And no amount of coming here in attack mode or comparing Avast! to ESET will get it done any faster. You got your answer…
furthermore you have to ask yourself, if it makes sense to apply such a long list to avast!. Usually you use third party tools for that and the URL blocker is right now more a nice feature for blocking single sites, when other users use your PC or to prevent some program from permanently accessing the same url, rather than a full-blown child/surf protection solution, where you could for example configure a list of users with fixed amount of time to surf on the web.
Malicious URLs are blocked by the network shield’s blacklist or by real-time scanning with the web shield anyway, therefore you may just exclude specific urls. At least at the moment…maybe avast! 7 will feature extended site-blocking features…
I use Chrome and Opera the most right now, and I know Adblock Plus is available for FF and Chrome. But each plugin on Chrome uses about 1 process, and which I don’t even need, if I apply the blacklist to my current antivirus. This works universally with all browsers with no additional plugins or process, and any changes for urls can be applied to all browsers. Even I can apply this list to Opera’s “Blocked Content”, but I don’t see the reason to use it.