9 ms·

Ad Blocking Extensions Tested for Performance

282 points by rayshan 11y ago

scrollaway 11y ago
blogspam, stop upvoting this please.
- dang 11y ago
  Is that fair? The article looks a bit spammy, but seems to be an actual test not copied from elsewhere.
  - mcintyre1994 11y ago
    The article's solid and substantial, it's the first I've seen to quantify the effect of ABP's acceptable ads policy. Also they have a view all button that works.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    Sorry, you're right. The format looks like blogspam; I closed it nearly immediately. A "10x" title, ads, a "Norton" icon at the top (what?)...
- mtgx 11y ago
  How is it blogspam? It looks like a comprehensive test.
rockdoe 11y ago
They didn't seem to know about e10s in Firefox Nightly which would have solved their "no separate process" thing. Measuring peak CPU is very, very stupid. The best Ad Blocker should have near 100% CPU but for an extremely short amount of time. Using 100% CPU is making the most efficient use of the hardware, not being inefficient. Now, I think due to the way they're measuring, it's actually closer to being average CPU because task manager samples over a period. Also: "Firefox didn’t like this page at all and we couldn’t get consistent readings to run tests, on every refresh the browser would simply not respond or crash." Huh? I think somethings wrong there. Firefox obviously renders tmz.com. A bug in the thing they used to monitor page load times? Did they check the performance impact of it?
- mirimir 11y ago
  Yes, Firefox loads tmz.com just fine. In a Debian VM, through a nested chain of three VPN services. But then, that's with Noscript and Adblock Plus. Also, Privacy Badger reports 47 trackers on raymond.cc but just 20 on tmz.com ;)
- zobzu 11y ago
  Yeah thats pretty weird it does load just fine. that makes me question the validity of the test in general... also it'd be interesting to benchmark tracking protection vs ublock on Firefox.
- zamalek 11y ago
  > Measuring peak CPU is very, very stupid. The best Ad Blocker should have near 100% CPU but for an extremely short amount of time. You'd be surprised about how many people perceive this as a bad thing. I've more than once had tickets from customers complaining about high CPU usage under load scenarios. Can't wait to see what journalists make of Servo (which, if up to scratch, will hopefully peg CPU near 100% for a brief period). However, higher CPU usage associated with longer response times is a different story entirely. > it's actually closer to being average CPU because task manager samples over a period. Forget about that: they're even using the wrong tool. Perfmon should have been used. Eyeballing it is completely useless. > Firefox obviously renders tmz.com. Renders perfectly for me, too.
  - userbinator 11y ago
    I've more than once had tickets from customers complaining about high CPU usage under load scenarios What they're really saying is not "you should make the CPU usage lower by spreading it over a longer time", but that the CPU is at 100% for an excessively long period of time. In other words, that 100% period should ideally be so short that it's below the sampling interval and does not appear as 100%.
- dingaling 11y ago
  > Using 100% CPU is making the most efficient use of the hardware, not being inefficient Not necessarily with modern processors. A power-managedCPU at 50% clock-speed actually uses less than half of the power as at 100%. The relationship of speed to power is not linear, so for a laptop user the most efficient use of hardware might actually be running one job for twice as long at half-speed.
akazuba 11y ago
Can ghostery block ads? I thought it just blocked trackers
aidos 11y ago
So it looks like about 1/4 of the time spent loading a page these days is spent on the page and the remaining 3/4 are waiting for ad networks. There's got to be an opportunity there. I previously worked at a digital agency and one of my final projects was building the website for a large TV channel. At one point I had to have a meeting with the ad network to go through the integration. The technical people involved didn't know anything about how their products worked or the implications of integrating them. No idea if they were blocking or async. At one point I was trying to understand what, if any, changes I might need to make to handle their ads that did full background take overs. "No no no, it's an expanding mpu" - sure, fine, what does that even mean!? (Don't get me started on having to swap using js for switching images in the gallery for using individual pages because the onmiture page tracking numbers were the metric that everything was measured by for selling ad space) /rant You'd think with all the smart people that have put their minds to ads on the internet, there would be lightning fast, targeted ads that actually worked by now.
- Swizec 11y ago
  > You'd think with all the smart people that have put their minds to ads on the internet, there would be lightning fast, targeted ads that actually worked by now. It's called Facebook Ads, and Google AdWords. Another name for what you seek is "product placement in movies". Yet another is PR. For instance, looking at the trailer for the new Transporter, one has to wonder how much Audi paid to have that movie made. And if you look closely at most journalism on the modern web, it is nothing but a thinly veiled ad for a thing.
  - pbhjpbhj 11y ago
    I've got Google ads on my blog and they add 2.4s to a 4.9s load time. Google's own Pagespeed shows me that they [Google] are not doing basic things like caching immutable resources or minifying javascripts - which to me is really baffling. Indeed the longest events on the page - as reported by Firefox dev tools - are connections to https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/ https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/ which are 0.7 and 0.8s; connection to https://www.google.com/pagead/drt/ui https://www.google.com/pagead/drt/ui which is 1.3s; and connection to http://fls-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/ http://fls-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/ is 1.4s. Meanwhile on a commercial page I manage the second hint on my 94/100 score on Pagespeed is to "leverage browser caching" - all the resources listed, like api.js, are part of Google's analytics. Under minify javascript there are Facebook and Google resources (for Like and +1 buttons). This is of course not a scientific analysis; instead I say it to illustrate that the smart people at Google and Facebook don't appear to be focussed on this end of things - I'm guessing the minify thing saves them resources, that they minify based on a balance of delivery costs vs. processing costs and that full minification is not worthwhile to them ... I'm just annoyed I can't get a 100/100 pagespeed score without removing Google's ads/analytics from pages!
the-dude 11y ago
One of my pet projects is 'wijVrij', a cheap TP-Link router with OpenWRT and a bootup-script which installs the winhelp2002 hosts file. Works wonders on all your devices. https://wijvrij.nl https://wijvrij.nl ( dutch )
jackgavigan 11y ago
At the end of last year, I spent a while working with an adtech firm, helping them figure out their product strategy. They all use Ghostery and I started using it too. Subjectively, my web-browsing experience improved massively, particularly page load times. It's nice to see that experience borne out by objective testing. I often think that companies like Ghostery are missing a trick by not advertising themselves as a method of speeding up your internet connection because that's really what it does.
- XzetaU8 11y ago
  "Ghostery, NoScript.. add-ons frequently phone home" https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2015-April/015236.html https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2015-A...
  - stingraycharles 11y ago
    Well yeah, because Ghostery is a product of Evidon, which helps adtech businesses to get visitors to opt-in to tracking. It's a clever strategy, because they give valuable feedback about which ads and trackers are blocked for which reasons. If you can't beat them, outcompete them! (I worked as CTO of an adserving platform and had to reject sales calls from Evidon on an almost monthly basis)
- paulryanrogers 11y ago
  If they were using Ghostery to block ads--aside from testing--that would be ironic.
andor 11y ago
A much overlooked alternative to installing sketchy addons is to simply disable Javascript by default.
- dtech 11y ago
  This also breaks 95% of the web
  - emn13 11y ago
    Just 95%?
  - barrkel 11y ago
    Nowhere near 95% of the web; I can attest to this because I disable JS on my default phone browser, and it speeds up everything massively. Something may be broken on 95% of web pages (e.g. commenting or menus), but the main bit of the web - rendering hypertext and following links - mostly works. Web applications less so, of course. But I don't think they're 95% of the web.
  - andor 11y ago
    You're spreading FUD. Disabling Javascript by default is one of the easiest ways to reduce browser attack surface, improve page load times and to remove the most annoying ads. The vast majority of pages work (to some degree) without scripts. If you really need scripting on a page, it's very uncomplicated to add an exception in Chrome: just click the "Javascript blocked" icon in the address bar, and choose "Always allow Javascript on example.com".
    - chimeracoder 11y ago
      > improve page load times and to remove the most annoying ads. The vast majority of pages work (to some degree) without scripts. In my experience using NoScript for the past year on all my desktops and laptops, this is at best only partly true. Load times do definitely decrease, but this is dwarfed by the effect of having to reload the page for most new sites after re-enabling Javascript (since so many sites are unusable without Javascript[0]). In the end, it's a much slower experience browsing the web, not faster, and even with aggressive whitelisting, it's still rather frustrating. I actually have separate Firefox profiles that I use for various websites that tend to be particularly problematic with extensions (like online banking), so I'm not even including those in this summary. I wish using NoScript provided a faster browsing experience overall while providing better security, but the simple fact remains that right now, it does not. It provides better security at the expense of slowing down your browsing experience. [0] So many static blogs now literally fail to display static text without Javascript!
emn13 11y ago
The methodology is questionable on several fronts: - you can't use the load event to compare advert-heavy vs. advert-free load times. The load event does not fire when the page is usable by the viewer, it fires when every last request is done, in particular even requests fired from various advert iframes. However, those requests may not impact page usability. The load event may even never fire - any offscreen 1px spacer gif that times out will cause that! I don't think there is a built-in event for "done-enough", but the load event is certainly misleading. - opening the developer tools causes various side-effects; those can cause the page to load more slowly than usual. You shouldn't benchmark with developer tools open (unless you're explicitly targeting usage with devtools open...) - comparing load times across browsers as reported by the browsers themselves may be valid, but it's not obvious. You definitely want to check that carefully. - Measuring "peak" CPU usage is almost meaningless without considering how long the CPU is used. - Measuring the chrome extension process CPU usage and memory usage isn't very helpful, because running this kind of extension causes CPU usage and memory usage in every content tab. Both of these statistics for chrome in this use-case are meaningless. You'd need to measure the memory usage and CPU-time of the entire chrome process tree to get meaningful results. Even in Firefox without e10s it's not valid to measure just the main process CPU and memory usage because plugins are in separate processes (and things like flash or h264 decoding can definitely use CPU and memory). The only thing this page really makes a decent case for is that Chrome loads pages faster than Firefox - but even there, it's not clear we're dealing with an apples-to-apples comparison.
- eXpl0it3r 11y ago
  > you can't use the load event to compare advert-heavy vs. advert-free load times I don't see why not. It's exactly what they want to show, how much quicker pages can load if you don't have to load the ads. And I personally am not satisfied with a page that has loaded to the extend of usability. Either a site loads fast or it doesn't. > opening the developer tools causes various side-effects As long as it's done for all the tests it should not matter. Whatever "side-effects" are introduced will be applied for all tests. Of course this means that the values themselves can't be used to compare the result against other tests, but the goal here was anyways to compare between the different ad blocks and not to generate values for general statistics.
taspeotis 11y ago
I've found uBlock Origin increases memory usage heavily on https://vimcolorschemetest.googlecode.com/svn/html/index-c.html https://vimcolorschemetest.googlecode.com/svn/html/index-c.h...
- asdfaoeu 11y ago
  To be fair that page has 430 iframes. I'd say that's fairly atypical.
  - the8472 11y ago
    Atypical? Amazon does (did?) heavily use some <iframe>/<object> trickery to preload resources.
- dale-cooper 11y ago
  On the other hand, i just tried opening this page with adblock plus and it froze the browser tab for quite a while. Switched to ublock origin and at least the tab stays responsive.
Fiahil 11y ago
Sure it's a nice test, and gives a keen idea of how much performance you can grab by using uBlock Origin. However, what about pages _without_ ads? Am I going to experience a significant performance hit when running an adblocker on genuine websites? This is important. Because, assuming the advertising industry is going to self-destruct tomorrow morning, am I going to experience a slower web if I let my add-on activated, and thus letting an opportunity for the ads to reappear later?
- bhouston 11y ago
  uBlock Origin seems pretty comparable to most of the other adblockers with the exception of the pretty horrible AdBlock Plus.
mnw21cam 11y ago
Would be interesting to have tested using a hosts file (like from http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ ) instead of an ad blocker. Seems to work very well for me, and it doesn't cause the browser to use loads of RAM.
- huuu 11y ago
  I'm not sure: isn't it faster to just refuse the request than directing it to localhost and waiting for a time out?
  - JoachimSchipper 11y ago
    localhost will RST the connection just fine, provided you don't have a webserver listening there.
  - rocky1138 11y ago
    That's the point. We'd like to see which is faster.
  - jlgaddis 11y ago
    As long as you don't have a firewall blocking traffic to/from localhost, the TCP connection will be reset almost immediately (assuming you don't have an httpd running on port 80) so you won't have to wait for a timeout.
amelius 11y ago
Are there any ad-blockers out there that also block Google ads (inline in websites, and also on top of search results)?
- asdfaoeu 11y ago
  uBlock Origin does, though I'm pretty sure all do.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
tim333 11y ago
Next we need to find the best blocker cocktail. I use uBlock Origin, Ghostery and Flashcontrol on Chrome. Bit over the top possibly - can take a bit of trial an error to see what's blocking the thing if something you want doesn't load.
- tomku 11y ago
  Seconding the combo of uBlock Origin and Ghostery, but I use the built-in plugin blocking in Chrome. Does Flashcontrol offer anything over that?
- jdmichal 11y ago
  Have you tried uMatrix? If you have, I'm curious how you think it compares to your current mix.
  - the8472 11y ago
    seconded, for people who want to sacrifice some convenience for control µmatrix may be a better choice.
jmnicolas 11y ago
I heard about µblock origin on HN and blindly trusted the positive comments. Glad to see my trust was well deserved, thank you all.
teaneedz 11y ago
Why is uBlock somewhat frowned upon here on HN? From what I've seen published it's still a good solution - works well for me. I thought the original developer gave up the project and was being rather difficult about the whole thing.
- rockdoe 11y ago
  He came back and has been improving it actively, and wasn't too happy about technical decisions in the fork.
malchow 11y ago
In reality, people want a page that becomes usable as quickly as possible. Specifically, people use hovers and scrolling to test that a given page is 'ready.' That is very different from a page that fires DOMContentLoaded as quickly as possible. That metric is pretty much irrelevant to real people. Which is part of why ads aren't quite as nasty as a lot of tech industry people make out.
- degenerate 11y ago
  When I start scrolling and the page seems ready to use, and then ads start popping in late and breaking the document flow in the first few seconds - you better believe I'm blocking them on your site.
  - malchow 11y ago
    I quite agree. There's no excuse for that. Although most of the time it isn't the fault of the website or publisher, but rather of an adtech partner.
    - manigandham 11y ago
      It's both. It's a shared execution and the publishers haven't really put the work in either. Check how well http://www.theguardian.com/ http://www.theguardian.com/ loads and you can see that it's perfect possibly to have plenty of ads while still having a great reading experience.
      - malchow 11y ago
        Do you know what their architecture is? It is fast.
        manigandham 11y ago
        Some details here: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/developer-blog/2014/dec/29/what-is-the-guardians-tech-stack http://www.theguardian.com/technology/developer-blog/2014/de... It's not really the backend that matters, these days its the front-end setup that makes the biggest difference. Less javascript, less huge unnecessary images, less "interactive" crap and streamlining the loading of content first then ads async can make a site load pretty quick. They also style the ad slot dimensions (since all banners are standard sizes) which keeps the content from moving around when an ad does load. Its just simple effective optimizations, something that should be done but for some combination of bad talent, bad management and poor priorities, just isnt.
rocky1138 11y ago
I would have really liked to have seen an ad-reduced hosts file compared to these in-browser blockers. http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
jakeogh 11y ago
Lowest overhead: Disable JS (add it to a hotkey) and use DNS level filtering: https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsmasq-blacklist https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsmasq-blacklist With surf+tabbed, each tab is it's own process, so you can enable and disable JS and or plugins per page.
sandworm101 11y ago
Forgetting the accuracy of the OP, I cannot be the only one who doesn't care in the least that adblockers slow load times. Between my ISP's shoddy service, the popups and distracting animations adblockers stop, the net effect is a faster overall experience. A few seconds on page load is a fair price to pay for the increased privacy and security.

282 points by rayshan 11y ago

scrollaway 11y ago

blogspam, stop upvoting this please.

dang 11y ago
Is that fair? The article looks a bit spammy, but seems to be an actual test not copied from elsewhere.
- mcintyre1994 11y ago
  The article's solid and substantial, it's the first I've seen to quantify the effect of ABP's acceptable ads policy. Also they have a view all button that works.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  Sorry, you're right. The format looks like blogspam; I closed it nearly immediately. A "10x" title, ads, a "Norton" icon at the top (what?)...
mtgx 11y ago
How is it blogspam? It looks like a comprehensive test.

rockdoe 11y ago

They didn't seem to know about e10s in Firefox Nightly which would have solved their "no separate process" thing. Measuring peak CPU is very, very stupid. The best Ad Blocker should have near 100% CPU but for an extremely short amount of time. Using 100% CPU is making the most efficient use of the hardware, not being inefficient. Now, I think due to the way they're measuring, it's actually closer to being average CPU because task manager samples over a period. Also: "Firefox didn’t like this page at all and we couldn’t get consistent readings to run tests, on every refresh the browser would simply not respond or crash." Huh? I think somethings wrong there. Firefox obviously renders tmz.com. A bug in the thing they used to monitor page load times? Did they check the performance impact of it?

mirimir 11y ago
Yes, Firefox loads tmz.com just fine. In a Debian VM, through a nested chain of three VPN services. But then, that's with Noscript and Adblock Plus. Also, Privacy Badger reports 47 trackers on raymond.cc but just 20 on tmz.com ;)
zobzu 11y ago
Yeah thats pretty weird it does load just fine. that makes me question the validity of the test in general... also it'd be interesting to benchmark tracking protection vs ublock on Firefox.
zamalek 11y ago
> Measuring peak CPU is very, very stupid. The best Ad Blocker should have near 100% CPU but for an extremely short amount of time. You'd be surprised about how many people perceive this as a bad thing. I've more than once had tickets from customers complaining about high CPU usage under load scenarios. Can't wait to see what journalists make of Servo (which, if up to scratch, will hopefully peg CPU near 100% for a brief period). However, higher CPU usage associated with longer response times is a different story entirely. > it's actually closer to being average CPU because task manager samples over a period. Forget about that: they're even using the wrong tool. Perfmon should have been used. Eyeballing it is completely useless. > Firefox obviously renders tmz.com. Renders perfectly for me, too.
- userbinator 11y ago
  I've more than once had tickets from customers complaining about high CPU usage under load scenarios What they're really saying is not "you should make the CPU usage lower by spreading it over a longer time", but that the CPU is at 100% for an excessively long period of time. In other words, that 100% period should ideally be so short that it's below the sampling interval and does not appear as 100%.
dingaling 11y ago
> Using 100% CPU is making the most efficient use of the hardware, not being inefficient Not necessarily with modern processors. A power-managedCPU at 50% clock-speed actually uses less than half of the power as at 100%. The relationship of speed to power is not linear, so for a laptop user the most efficient use of hardware might actually be running one job for twice as long at half-speed.

akazuba 11y ago

Can ghostery block ads? I thought it just blocked trackers

aidos 11y ago

So it looks like about 1/4 of the time spent loading a page these days is spent on the page and the remaining 3/4 are waiting for ad networks. There's got to be an opportunity there. I previously worked at a digital agency and one of my final projects was building the website for a large TV channel. At one point I had to have a meeting with the ad network to go through the integration. The technical people involved didn't know anything about how their products worked or the implications of integrating them. No idea if they were blocking or async. At one point I was trying to understand what, if any, changes I might need to make to handle their ads that did full background take overs. "No no no, it's an expanding mpu" - sure, fine, what does that even mean!? (Don't get me started on having to swap using js for switching images in the gallery for using individual pages because the onmiture page tracking numbers were the metric that everything was measured by for selling ad space) /rant You'd think with all the smart people that have put their minds to ads on the internet, there would be lightning fast, targeted ads that actually worked by now.

Swizec 11y ago
> You'd think with all the smart people that have put their minds to ads on the internet, there would be lightning fast, targeted ads that actually worked by now. It's called Facebook Ads, and Google AdWords. Another name for what you seek is "product placement in movies". Yet another is PR. For instance, looking at the trailer for the new Transporter, one has to wonder how much Audi paid to have that movie made. And if you look closely at most journalism on the modern web, it is nothing but a thinly veiled ad for a thing.
- pbhjpbhj 11y ago
  I've got Google ads on my blog and they add 2.4s to a 4.9s load time. Google's own Pagespeed shows me that they [Google] are not doing basic things like caching immutable resources or minifying javascripts - which to me is really baffling. Indeed the longest events on the page - as reported by Firefox dev tools - are connections to https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/ https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/ which are 0.7 and 0.8s; connection to https://www.google.com/pagead/drt/ui https://www.google.com/pagead/drt/ui which is 1.3s; and connection to http://fls-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/ http://fls-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/ is 1.4s. Meanwhile on a commercial page I manage the second hint on my 94/100 score on Pagespeed is to "leverage browser caching" - all the resources listed, like api.js, are part of Google's analytics. Under minify javascript there are Facebook and Google resources (for Like and +1 buttons). This is of course not a scientific analysis; instead I say it to illustrate that the smart people at Google and Facebook don't appear to be focussed on this end of things - I'm guessing the minify thing saves them resources, that they minify based on a balance of delivery costs vs. processing costs and that full minification is not worthwhile to them ... I'm just annoyed I can't get a 100/100 pagespeed score without removing Google's ads/analytics from pages!

the-dude 11y ago

One of my pet projects is 'wijVrij', a cheap TP-Link router with OpenWRT and a bootup-script which installs the winhelp2002 hosts file. Works wonders on all your devices. https://wijvrij.nl https://wijvrij.nl ( dutch )

jackgavigan 11y ago

At the end of last year, I spent a while working with an adtech firm, helping them figure out their product strategy. They all use Ghostery and I started using it too. Subjectively, my web-browsing experience improved massively, particularly page load times. It's nice to see that experience borne out by objective testing. I often think that companies like Ghostery are missing a trick by not advertising themselves as a method of speeding up your internet connection because that's really what it does.

XzetaU8 11y ago
"Ghostery, NoScript.. add-ons frequently phone home" https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2015-April/015236.html https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2015-A...
- stingraycharles 11y ago
  Well yeah, because Ghostery is a product of Evidon, which helps adtech businesses to get visitors to opt-in to tracking. It's a clever strategy, because they give valuable feedback about which ads and trackers are blocked for which reasons. If you can't beat them, outcompete them! (I worked as CTO of an adserving platform and had to reject sales calls from Evidon on an almost monthly basis)
paulryanrogers 11y ago
If they were using Ghostery to block ads--aside from testing--that would be ironic.

andor 11y ago

A much overlooked alternative to installing sketchy addons is to simply disable Javascript by default.

dtech 11y ago
This also breaks 95% of the web
- emn13 11y ago
  Just 95%?
- barrkel 11y ago
  Nowhere near 95% of the web; I can attest to this because I disable JS on my default phone browser, and it speeds up everything massively. Something may be broken on 95% of web pages (e.g. commenting or menus), but the main bit of the web - rendering hypertext and following links - mostly works. Web applications less so, of course. But I don't think they're 95% of the web.
- andor 11y ago
  You're spreading FUD. Disabling Javascript by default is one of the easiest ways to reduce browser attack surface, improve page load times and to remove the most annoying ads. The vast majority of pages work (to some degree) without scripts. If you really need scripting on a page, it's very uncomplicated to add an exception in Chrome: just click the "Javascript blocked" icon in the address bar, and choose "Always allow Javascript on example.com".
  - chimeracoder 11y ago
    > improve page load times and to remove the most annoying ads. The vast majority of pages work (to some degree) without scripts. In my experience using NoScript for the past year on all my desktops and laptops, this is at best only partly true. Load times do definitely decrease, but this is dwarfed by the effect of having to reload the page for most new sites after re-enabling Javascript (since so many sites are unusable without Javascript[0]). In the end, it's a much slower experience browsing the web, not faster, and even with aggressive whitelisting, it's still rather frustrating. I actually have separate Firefox profiles that I use for various websites that tend to be particularly problematic with extensions (like online banking), so I'm not even including those in this summary. I wish using NoScript provided a faster browsing experience overall while providing better security, but the simple fact remains that right now, it does not. It provides better security at the expense of slowing down your browsing experience. [0] So many static blogs now literally fail to display static text without Javascript!

emn13 11y ago

The methodology is questionable on several fronts: - you can't use the load event to compare advert-heavy vs. advert-free load times. The load event does not fire when the page is usable by the viewer, it fires when every last request is done, in particular even requests fired from various advert iframes. However, those requests may not impact page usability. The load event may even never fire - any offscreen 1px spacer gif that times out will cause that! I don't think there is a built-in event for "done-enough", but the load event is certainly misleading. - opening the developer tools causes various side-effects; those can cause the page to load more slowly than usual. You shouldn't benchmark with developer tools open (unless you're explicitly targeting usage with devtools open...) - comparing load times across browsers as reported by the browsers themselves may be valid, but it's not obvious. You definitely want to check that carefully. - Measuring "peak" CPU usage is almost meaningless without considering how long the CPU is used. - Measuring the chrome extension process CPU usage and memory usage isn't very helpful, because running this kind of extension causes CPU usage and memory usage in every content tab. Both of these statistics for chrome in this use-case are meaningless. You'd need to measure the memory usage and CPU-time of the entire chrome process tree to get meaningful results. Even in Firefox without e10s it's not valid to measure just the main process CPU and memory usage because plugins are in separate processes (and things like flash or h264 decoding can definitely use CPU and memory). The only thing this page really makes a decent case for is that Chrome loads pages faster than Firefox - but even there, it's not clear we're dealing with an apples-to-apples comparison.

eXpl0it3r 11y ago
> you can't use the load event to compare advert-heavy vs. advert-free load times I don't see why not. It's exactly what they want to show, how much quicker pages can load if you don't have to load the ads. And I personally am not satisfied with a page that has loaded to the extend of usability. Either a site loads fast or it doesn't. > opening the developer tools causes various side-effects As long as it's done for all the tests it should not matter. Whatever "side-effects" are introduced will be applied for all tests. Of course this means that the values themselves can't be used to compare the result against other tests, but the goal here was anyways to compare between the different ad blocks and not to generate values for general statistics.

taspeotis 11y ago

I've found uBlock Origin increases memory usage heavily on https://vimcolorschemetest.googlecode.com/svn/html/index-c.html https://vimcolorschemetest.googlecode.com/svn/html/index-c.h...

asdfaoeu 11y ago
To be fair that page has 430 iframes. I'd say that's fairly atypical.
- the8472 11y ago
  Atypical? Amazon does (did?) heavily use some <iframe>/<object> trickery to preload resources.
dale-cooper 11y ago
On the other hand, i just tried opening this page with adblock plus and it froze the browser tab for quite a while. Switched to ublock origin and at least the tab stays responsive.

Fiahil 11y ago

Sure it's a nice test, and gives a keen idea of how much performance you can grab by using uBlock Origin. However, what about pages _without_ ads? Am I going to experience a significant performance hit when running an adblocker on genuine websites? This is important. Because, assuming the advertising industry is going to self-destruct tomorrow morning, am I going to experience a slower web if I let my add-on activated, and thus letting an opportunity for the ads to reappear later?

bhouston 11y ago
uBlock Origin seems pretty comparable to most of the other adblockers with the exception of the pretty horrible AdBlock Plus.

mnw21cam 11y ago

Would be interesting to have tested using a hosts file (like from http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ ) instead of an ad blocker. Seems to work very well for me, and it doesn't cause the browser to use loads of RAM.

huuu 11y ago
I'm not sure: isn't it faster to just refuse the request than directing it to localhost and waiting for a time out?
- JoachimSchipper 11y ago
  localhost will RST the connection just fine, provided you don't have a webserver listening there.
- rocky1138 11y ago
  That's the point. We'd like to see which is faster.
- jlgaddis 11y ago
  As long as you don't have a firewall blocking traffic to/from localhost, the TCP connection will be reset almost immediately (assuming you don't have an httpd running on port 80) so you won't have to wait for a timeout.

amelius 11y ago

Are there any ad-blockers out there that also block Google ads (inline in websites, and also on top of search results)?

asdfaoeu 11y ago
uBlock Origin does, though I'm pretty sure all do.

deleted 11y ago

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tim333 11y ago

Next we need to find the best blocker cocktail. I use uBlock Origin, Ghostery and Flashcontrol on Chrome. Bit over the top possibly - can take a bit of trial an error to see what's blocking the thing if something you want doesn't load.

tomku 11y ago
Seconding the combo of uBlock Origin and Ghostery, but I use the built-in plugin blocking in Chrome. Does Flashcontrol offer anything over that?
jdmichal 11y ago
Have you tried uMatrix? If you have, I'm curious how you think it compares to your current mix.
- the8472 11y ago
  seconded, for people who want to sacrifice some convenience for control µmatrix may be a better choice.

jmnicolas 11y ago

I heard about µblock origin on HN and blindly trusted the positive comments. Glad to see my trust was well deserved, thank you all.

teaneedz 11y ago

Why is uBlock somewhat frowned upon here on HN? From what I've seen published it's still a good solution - works well for me. I thought the original developer gave up the project and was being rather difficult about the whole thing.

rockdoe 11y ago
He came back and has been improving it actively, and wasn't too happy about technical decisions in the fork.

malchow 11y ago

In reality, people want a page that becomes usable as quickly as possible. Specifically, people use hovers and scrolling to test that a given page is 'ready.' That is very different from a page that fires DOMContentLoaded as quickly as possible. That metric is pretty much irrelevant to real people. Which is part of why ads aren't quite as nasty as a lot of tech industry people make out.

degenerate 11y ago
When I start scrolling and the page seems ready to use, and then ads start popping in late and breaking the document flow in the first few seconds - you better believe I'm blocking them on your site.
- malchow 11y ago
  I quite agree. There's no excuse for that. Although most of the time it isn't the fault of the website or publisher, but rather of an adtech partner.
  - manigandham 11y ago
    It's both. It's a shared execution and the publishers haven't really put the work in either. Check how well http://www.theguardian.com/ http://www.theguardian.com/ loads and you can see that it's perfect possibly to have plenty of ads while still having a great reading experience.
    - malchow 11y ago
      Do you know what their architecture is? It is fast.
      - manigandham 11y ago
        Some details here: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/developer-blog/2014/dec/29/what-is-the-guardians-tech-stack http://www.theguardian.com/technology/developer-blog/2014/de... It's not really the backend that matters, these days its the front-end setup that makes the biggest difference. Less javascript, less huge unnecessary images, less "interactive" crap and streamlining the loading of content first then ads async can make a site load pretty quick. They also style the ad slot dimensions (since all banners are standard sizes) which keeps the content from moving around when an ad does load. Its just simple effective optimizations, something that should be done but for some combination of bad talent, bad management and poor priorities, just isnt.

rocky1138 11y ago

I would have really liked to have seen an ad-reduced hosts file compared to these in-browser blockers. http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt

deleted 11y ago

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jakeogh 11y ago

Lowest overhead: Disable JS (add it to a hotkey) and use DNS level filtering: https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsmasq-blacklist https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsmasq-blacklist With surf+tabbed, each tab is it's own process, so you can enable and disable JS and or plugins per page.

sandworm101 11y ago

Forgetting the accuracy of the OP, I cannot be the only one who doesn't care in the least that adblockers slow load times. Between my ISP's shoddy service, the popups and distracting animations adblockers stop, the net effect is a faster overall experience. A few seconds on page load is a fair price to pay for the increased privacy and security.