Mobile apps are also loaded with third party ad and spyware frameworks which bloats up the size.

Not for sure exactly, maybe there are some details on the forums?

https://www.oldunreal.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=4969

While not open source, OldUnreal has taken over Unreal and Unreal Tournament with access to the source code and they release patches. The OldUnreal team has an agreement with Epic to do this.

https://github.com/OldUnreal/UnrealTournamentPatches

I was actually trying to do some research on this as well to verify the claim, but couldn’t find a definitive answer. I’m not for sure whether uBlock blocks complete JavaScript libraries from loading by default or if it is only blocks the HTTP request like PiHole.

I did find this interesting project by DuckDuckGo which provides empty implementations of the JavaScript libraries when adblockers break the site. This seems to imply that some adblockers do prevent the JavaScript library from loading at all.

https://github.com/duckduckgo/tracker-surrogates

uBlock Origin just prevents the network requests from these tracking frameworks from completing. All the javascript tracking code I believe still executes, just doesn’t return.

If it were possible it would be great to prevent these javascript frameworks from being loaded at all by the browser. But I guess the website javascript code would break.

It would be interesting to replace the tracking frameworks with an empty stubbed out implementation that does nothing. Not for sure how feasible that would be.

It’s insane how wasteful modern software is. The infinite growth mindset causes companies to pack more useless features into software and load it up with spyware and adware.

Google and Facebook’s tracking and ad software are a big cause of computing waste in most websites and mobile apps.