Today I downloaded the new 1.5 version of Spybot S&D and tried the "improved" immunization feature. After immunizing Firefox, I noticed that it took significantly longer to load a page.

The reason is that 6,153 bad domains are added to the image blocklist, the popup blocklist and the XPI installation blocklist, which means that Firefox has to look through a list af almost 20,000 entries in total on every page load.

But the really bad thing is: This is absolutely unnecassary! Since the domains are already in the hosts file and thus are routed to 127.0.0.1, there is no chance for Firefox to load anything from those sites, no matter if images, cookies, installations, or whatever are on the blocklists. I have not tested the reaction of other browsers, but I noticed that Spybot S&D does the same here: It unnecessarily adds entries to browsers' internal blocklists although those entries are already in the hosts file.

Please fix this with an upcoming update and prevent this completely useless slowdown from happening.