Core performance improvements badly needed.

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Hi rebecca, thanks for posting and using Ghostery.

I am going to address the last statement first: Ghostery does not have, nor will ever have a hidden black list, exemption list, exclusion list, trusted list, or any other invisible list. Ghostery includes a whitelist thats totally user controlled and an internal database of trackers that our company maintains (but is local to the user so s/he could play with it if one so wants).

As to the performance: this is a constant battle between Firefox and the size of our tracker list. There are several things that affect performance in Firefox, but by far, the largest is the number of trackers that Ghostery looks for. We're just at over 600, almost 3x more than the number we've started with and we've redesigned and improved core engine several times, but the battle still rages so to say =). All other browsers are affected as well, just not to the same degree yet.

There are particulars that I could advise you on, for example, Google Reader is a fully ajax application that does most of its work through XHR calls. Ghostery in Firefox is capable of listening to those requests and reporting on them, but this particular feature is a pricey one -- its going to slow down a page like GR heavily. This feature is "Scan for dynamically inserted page elements" in Performance options. You may want to try disabling it to see if Ghostery performs better. Additionally, if you want Ghostery not to scan this page at all, there is always whitelisting.

Other big factor in Firefox performance are other addons running in parallel with Ghostery. Generally speaking, with every new addon, Firefox performance drops 1-10%. I could look into this more closely if you provide a list of enabled addons.

Lastly, I'd be interested in 2 items: your Ghostery configuration and your computer configuration (OS, RAM, that sort of thing) if you would like some more advice in terms of what could be done to improve performance of Ghostery.