11 ms·
Mozilla fixed a 14-year-old bug in Firefox, Adblock Plus uses less memory
- disillusioned 11y agoABP memory usage in Chrome made me switch to router-level ad blocking. Added bonus: it works on mobile too. I have weird page renderings sometimes, and whitelisting a legit site is a pain, but it's overall a huge value to off-load the blocking to the router.
- jtriangle 11y agoIf you're not on your network and you're on android and you're rooted you can sideload adaway to get ad blocking everywhere, including app-based ads.
- kbenson 11y agoOr set up a VPN to the same network that the router level blocking is on. Presumably if you can set up router level blocking, a VPN shouldn't be that big of a hurdle.
- zobzu 11y agoor just use firefox for android then, which also works with ublock origin anyway, and uses way less ram than chrome for android with and without ad blocking.
- btgeekboy 11y agoDo you have any documentation on this? It's something I've been interested in setting up.
- andreasvc 11y agoI use a similar technique based on DNS: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero/ http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero/
- joosters 11y agoI do a similar thing using Privoxy : http://www.privoxy.org/ http://www.privoxy.org/ You'll need to set up Privoxy on a machine on your network (unfortunately the config is not the easiest to get to grips with) and then set up your devices to use it as a HTTP/HTTPS proxy. If you have a VPN, you can configure clients to automatically use your proxy. For instance, on OpenVPN, add a couple of lines to the server.conf, using your own ip + ports: push "dhcp-option PROXY_HTTP 10.8.0.1 4862" push "dhcp-option PROXY_HTTPS 10.8.0.1 4862"
- wila 11y agoThat depends completely on the router software that you use. You will need to use a custom firmware like dd-wrt, tomato, openWRT, etcetera. I run it here on tomato and use something similar to: http://www.linksysinfo.org/index.php?threads/auto-dl-hosts-file-and-install.21378/ http://www.linksysinfo.org/index.php?threads/auto-dl-hosts-f...
- btgeekboy 11y agoIt's safe to assume I have a standard Linux system. I have an Ubiquiti EdgeRouter now, and a few regular x86_64 always-on systems behind it I can proxy traffic through if necessary.
- eponeponepon 11y agoThis amused me - about twenty minutes ago I'd noticed Firefox using way less memory that it usually does, but thought nothing more of it. Jung would have something to say about synchronicity, I'm sure.
- bitwarrior 11y agoNot really a bug, more of an enhancement.
- elinchrome 11y agoCem Kaner said that all the pedantry about whether or not something is a bug is irrelevant. He says a bug is anything a user perceives as wrong. I used to worry about calling things not-really-bugs, but when I adopted his viewpoint it gave me a better perspective on what's important in software.
- eponeponepon 11y agoI try to go the other way and push people towards avoiding calling anything a "bug" as much as possible. It helps a lot in change control to know what's a "new feature", what's an "improvement", what "needs clarification" - but it's administrative hell trying to work out priorities from hundreds of indeterminate "bugs".
- karlshea 11y agoJust like Mozilla's pedantry about what's a "memory leak" that let me to ditch Firefox for Chrome years ago.
- nnethercote 11y agoFirefox's memory usage is much better than it used to be, thanks to the MemShrink project (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink). Judging from sites like Hacker News, more people have trouble with memory usage on Chrome than on Firefox these days, and the same is true of performance in general. YMMV, but it might be worth trying Firefox again.
- euyyn 11y ago> more people have trouble with memory usage on Chrome than on Firefox these days Maybe it's just that Chrome has more users.
- AdmiralAsshat 11y agoGreat for everyone still using Adblock Plus. The rest of us switched to uBlock Origin and never looked back.
- unKlever 11y agoDo you have any tips for performance. I use chrome and ublock, umatrix and disconnect. Disconnect is a few second penalty but worth it for a free proxy. However, I am not sure whether ublock runs before uMatrix, or how much that matters. I was hoping to find a few great regex heuristics to speed things up and procide better blocking. I personally don't use 3rd party block by default because honestly why bother, sites display so shitty you might as well just noscript and whitelist. tldr; parent or anyone interested do you have suggestions surrounding: > good filter configurations in ublock > whitelist & regex config > use uMatrix? > how to optimize for performance? Ideally in chrome.
- ac29 11y agouBlock can use disconnect's filter lists, its in the options. I'm not sure why you think disconnect is giving you a "free proxy", that doesn't seem to be a feature.
- unKlever 11y agoIt runs anonymous search and returns the results from their servers proxied. It offers an actual VPN if i am not mistaken, as a paid service.
- witty_username 11y agouse tor, the latency is pretty low (at most it adds 500 ms)
- ethana 11y agoWhat people doesn't know is that uBlock makes use of EasyList as one of its default block lists. EasyList is maintained by ABP's parent company. That list itself has built-in whitelist that could not be turn off without revamping the list itself. That list contains upward of 60k of rules and no one has time to evaluate that for free. uBlock can make all kind of independence claims it wants, but at the end of the day, uBlock is still relying on ABP for its blocking rules--which is no guarantee at all. edit: lol why are people downvoting me for pointing out that uBlock is relying on ABP? uBlock never acctually claimed to not having acceptable ads. By using ABP's EasyList, they could already be running an "acceptable ads" whitelist. edit 2: Here's the link to easylist for anyone that care to check out the included whitelist: https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt Warning, the list is over 1mb.
- frandroid 11y agoSomeone needs to get in there and do better bug prioritization...
- arcameron 11y agoIt could be you! ;) https://careers.mozilla.org/en-US/position/ooIv1fwm https://careers.mozilla.org/en-US/position/ooIv1fwm
- nnethercote 11y agoIt's been known for 14 years that sharing this data might help some pages. But it was only last year that it became clear that it would provide big wins in a compelling use case (i.e. for AdBlock Plus users). See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=988266#c8 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=988266#c8 And then it took another 15 months to get fixed because it was a significant and complicated change.
- r721 11y agoJuly discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9809384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9809384
- addicted 11y agoI really prefer Ghostery. Gives a much better analysis of what's being blocked, with fine grain controls, and much nicer UI. I haven't measured the memory consumption, but I havent had any noticeable issues so far.
- dexterdog 11y agoI moved to Ghostery a few years ago and all I notice is that whenever I disable it most sites are far slower.
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoMy one huge problem with Ghostery is that it doesn't appear to provide any way to pinpoint the source of an ad. I only want to block intrusive ad providers, but the only way to go from "see an annoying ad" to "block its provider" in Ghostery is to play trial-and-error with potentially dozens of different trackers, blocking and reloading one at a time until the offending ad goes away. In ABP, you could do this with a couple of clicks. Am I missing something?
- zobzu 11y agopersonally i dont wanna keep "acceptable ads" because I believe there is no such thing. its unsollicited and always in my face => its an ads, and it annoys me - and im not even going to buy the product behind it. thus, i find ublock (for ex) much simpler to deal with than ghostery.
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoSo what you're saying is that you don't have an answer to my question, but you're not going to let that stop you from replying.
- ljk 11y agoDoes anyone know if it's worth switching back from uBlock for?
- gorhill 11y agoI updated the benchmarks (I published first back in March) for Firefox 41 and Chromium 45. Results: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Firefox-version:-benchmarking-memory-footprint#results https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Firefox-version:-benc...
- ljk 11y agoThanks for the update, long time fan of uBlock Origin! Good to know it's still the fastest!
- tdkl 11y agoAny info on Adblock Fast[1] ? They advertise as being lightweight with only 7 rules and I wonder how they compare to uBlock Origin (I'd still choose Origin because of the customization options). [1] http://adblockfast.com/ http://adblockfast.com/ And thank you for making browsing the Internet awesome.
- anc84 11y agoIt's snake oil. The 7 rules are 7 lines of many many rules. Stay clear of anyone making such misleading marketing claims!
- tdkl 11y agoWell yes, I'm aware it's highly suspicious, just didn't want any name calling. Just wanted to see the authors opinion about it and if he ever tested it out, or will in the future, specially if they claim such bold enhancements regarding ABP. If anyone can comment on this topic, it's gorhill.
- gorhill 11y ago
- reitanqild 11y agoHopefully they could also het arpund to fix the usability bug where the back button on the right click menu disappear if anything is selected...
- reitanqild 11y agoHopefully they could also get around to fix the usability bug where the back button on the right click menu disappear if anything is selected...
- kazinator 11y agoWow, that's quite weird. Not just the back button but refresh, bookmark (star icon), Save Page As ... As I type this comment, I'm noticing that you get almost this same reduced context menu when you right click on the edit box (with additional items like Paste and Check Spelling). Maybe the intent is that you don't unintentionally reload the page or back out when you're selecting. But then Backspace will navigate back regardless of whether you have a selection, and the main navigation bar's back button also works.
- Steltek 11y agoIt's been that way in Firefox for as long as I can remember (user since Firefox started). I believe the actual intent is that the right click menu is a "context" menu and not a shortcut menu. In this, case, the context is that you have text highlighted. Without a selection, the context is the page.
- kazinator 11y ago(Yet somehow, the NoScript add-on's command ends up on all these menus, haha!) Here is a point also: if you make a selection in one tab, and switch to another tab, the selection in the original tab persists. Yet in the other tab, the context menu is that of the page. This underscores the page versus selection semantics. Yet, it would probably be more effective if the context menu were the same, just with certain things greyed out based on state. For instance in, oh, Notepad on Windows (let's drag out that user interface superstars, why don't we) if you have text selected then the context menu enables Cut. If you don't have text selected, then Cut is still there, but greyed out. Hey look, it is that way in this very Firefox edit box that I'm typing in. The fact that we don't see "Cut" in the page context menu is just as bad as that we don't see the backbutton when there is a selection. Seeing a disabled Cut lets us know that we can select something and then Cut will be available. On that topic, here is another thing: the page context menu has Select All. That makes it clear that the context menu has a relationship to selections.
- 9fb29947 11y agoI like how 10 years passes between comment 4 and 6 in Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77999#c4 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77999#c4
- kzrdude 11y agoDoes it have a benefit on something else than ABP?
- heycam 11y agoThere are minor benefits without ABP. For each page/iframe that is created, we can avoid running the CSS cascade (and share those data structures) for the UA style sheets. It's saves something like 100 KiB per document. If other add-ons insert a common style sheet into all documents (it's plausible Stylish does something like this? though I've never checked) then we'll again be able to avoid running the cascade and having duplicate data structures for the cascade across different documents.
- iSnow 11y agoI just wanted to take the time to thank you for fixing that bug. Since I keep dozens of tabs open all the time, the memory consumption of FF has caused me a lot of pain (the browser gets really slow if it crosses 2.5GB real RAM consumption). So, you just made my life better, thanks :)
- heycam 11y agoCheers!
- zurn 11y agoI don't see any percentage-wise memory savings in the article or here in comments. How big a difference does a couple of MB per document make?
- creshal 11y agoDepends on how many tabs you have, and how many iframes etc. each tab contains.
- bzbarsky 11y agoDepends on the documents and how many there are. On your typical 50-100MB web-appy page (e.g. gmail) a couple MB is a few percent. On about:blank, which is normally a few hundred KB, a couple MB is several thousand percent. So if a page has lots of subframes and those subframes don't have much in them, you get large wins. The canonical things that have lots of subframes are techcrunch and the like, which have "like" buttons for several different social networks and whatnot all over them. Each of those "like" buttons is a separate iframe. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=988266#c7 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=988266#c7 has some relevant numbers for techcrunch; the difference there was 300MB vs 520MB or so (which means that the page has about 100 iframes, of course).
- cheezburgler 11y agoyup, it's totally fixed now https://i.imgur.com/tnys5oB.png https://i.imgur.com/tnys5oB.png
- eugeneionesco 11y agoPEBKAC in your case?
- cheezburgler 11y agoI have a reasonable number of tabs open. Besides that, I don't see how this could be my fault (except through plugins installed, but about:addons-memory does not show anything suspicious).
- dragon88 11y agoI honestly use use Ghostery which blocks all trackers. It prevents a lot of ads from loading/working because they often have to redirect to serve me the right one (which Ghostry prevents). Waaay less of a resource suck.