7 ms·
UBlock vs. ABP: efficiency compared
- known 11y agohttp://www.alternate-dns.com/ http://www.alternate-dns.com/ can filter ads at dns level
- diziet 11y agoI would go with a hosts file solution as it is something you can control yourself in case you need to.
- rbjorklin 11y agohttp://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
- SquareWheel 11y agoIt solves a lot of efficiency problems, but is hell for debugging a broken webpage. For that reason I feel the browser extension justifies its footprint.
- icebraining 11y agoTheir FAQ fails to answer the basic questions - who runs it, how is it funded and why should it be trusted? Your DNS server can log the domains you request and can serve malicious replies (particularly bad for HTTP and other non-authenticated protocols). Trusting some random server is not the smartest decision.
- pilooch 11y agoSince deep learning is dominating the news these days, this might be the opportunity to point to the potential new ways of dealing with ad blocking. One is using character-based convolutional (or recurrent) networks that read the URL characters and classify it as legit or ad. The interesting gain here is that there's no more conflicting regex nor optimization to work on huge lists of blocking rules. Instead, URLs can be passed to the network in batches. I have conducted my own set of experiments and a usable deep model is available (see http://www.deepdetect.com/applications/text_model/ http://www.deepdetect.com/applications/text_model/ ). This is kinda shameful plug, but I'm really interested in feedback on these new ways of ad blocking with high accuracy. For sure running a deep net service is not as easy as installing ublock but there are ways. The whole source code is Open Source, as is the model. I have more data at hand, and some larger models could be built. Performance assessment would be a good next step as well. EDIT: the linked page is rather long, lookup 'Novel task' to get to a quick classification example
- Pharaoh2 11y agoPart of the requirement of adblock software is to inject itself into the request pipeline in realtime and reject ad requests while at the same time causing as small a stall as possible and also using the least amount of resources. NN's running inside a browser don't satisfy any of those criterias.
- pilooch 11y agoNot inside a browser of course. If you consider enterprise-wide applications, NN would be better and possibly faster (with GPU) than a bluecoat proxy.
- Pharaoh2 11y agoI am still unconvinced if NN provide any advantage over regular expressions in this domain since it's not a hard problem to solve. Also, the request needs to be rejected before the connection is made so the only data to work with is the HTTP request headers. On an enterprise level, a better challenge to solve with NN would be to create a asic accelerated neural net hardware to filter packets/connections of IPS/IDS and firewall purpose with an extra ability of also possibly blocking advert.
- barrkel 11y agoThere are already commercial products that use NN and other ML techniques to classify and block malware, click fraud etc. - Cisco has one. It's certainly a valid and viable approach, even in the face of determined opposition.
- argonaut 11y agoA URL character based classifier would be very very easy to game. Perhaps you meant an image-based classifier, though in this case Pharoah2's objection about speed is an insurmountable issue even on an enterprise server, since classifying a website on a CPU would take many seconds; on a GPU it would probably be several hundred milliseconds, which is a few hundred milliseconds too many!
- personjerry 11y agoWould there be a difference between the UBlock mentioned here and the UBlock Origin that's notably separate?
- diziet 11y agoI believe the uBlock mentioned here is uBlock Origin.
- wldcordeiro 11y agoThere was some kind of schism between the original creator and someone who was intended to take on the project and the result is two extensions with the original changing its name.
- yeukhon 11y agoTill this date I have to be honest - I have to google the difference and still I constantly question who is the real one people recommend.... sigh.
- bdz 11y agoYes. This is Ublock Origin. The other one is simply Ublock https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/ublock https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/ublock
- personjerry 11y agoAh, the article itself didn't say origin anywhere. Thank you.
- XzetaU8 11y agoA bit more recent comparison "10 Ad Blocking Extensions Tested for Performance" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10127971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10127971
- kirk21 11y agoUBlock breaks Youtube for me.
- agumonkey 11y agoHow so ? I didn't notice a single issue (archlinux chromium).
- sdfin 11y agoWith UBlock Origin, I can see Youtube without problem.
- akhilcacharya 11y agoI've started having this problem as well. YouTube videos with ads return an error for about a minute, then start. I've started just disabling it on YouTube.
- netheril96 11y agoSo, what is the cause of this improved efficiency?
- d0100 11y agoUBlock Origin might be faster, but after I installed it, several websites lost their css formating... ABP just works well enough.
- degenerate 11y agoI've used UO for over a year and never had a single css file get removed. Any specific sites you mind mentioning?
- hackuser 11y agoCSS files often come from different hosts than the original site, usually CDNs or other static content hosts. Are you sure you enabled access to those hosts? What you describe is exactly what I'd expect to see, and what I've seen with other filtering extensions, if the static hosts weren't enabled.
- sysret 11y agoFunny that they are using HN for an exemplary web page for their benchmarks. HN does not require JavaScript. Even without using an ad blocker, if the user disables JavaScript, a large percentage of "ad tech" will not work. And ads will not be served. Then the game becomes how to get the user to turn on JavaScript for some other functionality.
- mobiuscog 11y agoMostly, the 'game' is the fact that the site just doesn't work without Javascript. HN is a very nice exception of keeping things simple.
- a_imho 11y agoEfficiency as in resource usage, not in blocked items.
- alimbada 11y agoAlso, not in terms of speed; ad blockers tend to slow down web page rendering especially on pages where there are a lot of ads.
- supersan 11y agoApart from efficiency the most important difference between these two is that Adblock has a default Whitelist which allows certain type of ads to pass (i.e. by charging advertisers like Google and Taboola millions of dollars to unblock their ads). [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/google-microsoft-amazon-taboola-pay-adblock-plus-to-stop-blocking-their-ads-2015-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/google-microsoft-amazon-taboo...
- mschuster91 11y agoWhile ABPs business model is ethically questionable, it is a win-win for all involved parties: 1) end users get spared from the worst bunch of ads (layer ads, huge screen-filling ads in the left/right margins between content and screen, auto-playing video ads, popup/popunder ads, ads that mess with your browsing history, pre-roll ads on video sites) 2) site owners don't have their revenue stream completely fucked with more and more people using ad blockers 3) advertisers, provided they play by the rules, still have a way to get their content out to users 4) ABP/Eyeo has financial resources for development, hosting, maintenance and is able to keep up in the whack-a-mole game with the nasty parts of the ad distribution networks
- rmc 11y agoOTOH your data is still being sent to the USA for snooping and spying.
- manigandham 11y agoIt sounds nice in theory but ABP charges an outrageous 30% and allows anyone who pays, regardless of the quality or performance of their ads. You can look at their whitelist and find all sorts of intrusive and shady ad networks in there. This kind of funding model is bound to incentivize ABP into taking the wrong actions and working with bad actors.
- hrvbr 11y agoAnd reversely uBlock Origin doesn't block ads on Twitter and Tumblr, which makes it much less useful to me than Adblock Plus.
- ywecur 11y ago* UBlock Origin
- anonymousab 11y agoIt would be interesting to see if ABP has improved since this benchmark was done. They seemed to be making honest strides to improve it.
- driverdan 11y agoThis is from a year ago. It's most likely out of date.
- yAnonymous 11y agoYes. uBlock Origin wins by an even bigger margin now, because it's being optimized further while the folks at Adblock are busy counting money.
- SimeVidas 11y agoWhat are the findings?
- alimbada 11y agoI use the original AdBlock for Chrome (not ABP). One of its features that I find indispensable is the ability to sync custom filters, filter lists and settings via Dropbox as I use Chrome on at least 3 different machines. I'd be willing to switch to uBlock Origin if it had a sync feature.
- agildehaus 11y agohttps://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Cloud-storage https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Cloud-storage It does.
- Nexxxeh 11y agouBlock Origin is also available on Firefox for Android. It's by far my favourite mobile browsing combo.
- noir_lord 11y agoAgreed, Firefox for Android isn't quite as slick as Chrome (yet) but not having to deal with obnoxious full page adds with tiny tap targets is a massive win.
- elinchrome 11y agoI use adguard vpn to add an extra layer of ad blocking on my phone. Also I block ads at the router at home.
- gumby 11y agoWhy is blocking as a browser extension common but blocking with a proxy not? I use a proxy[] which means I get ad blocking in my mail client, RSS reader etc. Is a proxy too much work? [] I use glimmerblocker. It's OK, the biggest "problem" is that I had to do a lot of tuning -- I think it's just one developer. And I had to write some code to get it to support HTTPS traffic (basically my proxy on my own machine had to perform a MITM "attack" on my behalf).
- nfbush 11y agoBecause there is more friction in setting up an ad blocking proxy, secondly your usage patterns differ from the normal where a majority are almost completely browser dependent