7 ms·

Show HN: A website speed test tool to compare uBlock Origin with plain Chrome

192 points by aberforth123 7y ago

dddddaviddddd 7y ago
Excellent way to show the weight of ads and trackers, very clean side by side comparison.
thenewnewguy 7y ago
Minor typo on the website: "or to proof to others they should use an ad blocker" (should be "as proof" or "to prove"). Also, suggestion: don't require typing http:// http:// or https:// https://
regnerba 7y ago
Why does the Reddit page get bigger with uBlock Origin? From 2.73 MB on Chrome to 8.48 with uBlock Origin. https://webtest.app/?url=https://reddit.com https://webtest.app/?url=https://reddit.com
- danShumway 7y ago
  I'm noticing that DomContentLoaded, Processing Time, and Load Time are all blank for Reddit withoutout uBO as well. I'm going to make a mild suggestion that the author double-check their implementation logic. Is it possible that the ad-encumbered page isn't loading before it times out? Or is it possible that without ads the page is loading more content? Even showing something like a comparison screenshot at the end might help in odd cases like this.
  - aberforth123 7y ago
    The screenshots didn't even load because the my tiny server ran out of memory when testing Reddit.
- aberforth123 7y ago
  This was an old result from when the server didn't have enough memory for big sites (especially the version without uBO). I reran it for Reddit, you can see the result on the same URL.
guessmyname 7y ago
YouTube sends more requests with uBlock Origin enabled? [1][2] My theory is, without the ads, there is more space in the webview to load video thumbnails, each item representing a video in the HTML document probably requires a handful of HTTP requests to load and pre-fetch their corresponding metadata. I would not be surprised if other websites react in the same way. I hope this is the case, but I am suspicious enough that I will investigate further how the ad-blocker affects these websites. [1] https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.youtube.com https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.youtube.com [2] https://i.imgur.com/HBB4TkK.png https://i.imgur.com/HBB4TkK.png
- ambicapter 7y ago
  If you look at the thumbnail of the web page seems like this would be the case.
- SpaceManiac 7y ago
  This is the case. With an addon that deletes most but not all homepage items or sidebar recommendations, YouTube does some noticeable spinning trying to fill the space which keeps getting emptied.
jackewiehose 7y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com takes a second longer with uBlock
- kgwxd 7y ago
  That means HN is doing things the right way :)
  - SwiftyBug 7y ago
    How is it so?
    - dvh 7y ago
      Page A loads content for X seconds and Z seconds loads ads. uBlock overhead is Y second but saves Z seconds by blocking ads. Total time with uBlock is X+Y-Z. If page has zero ads the time will be X+Y-0 which is greater than X+0.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - drusepth 7y ago
        Just to clarify, this is desirable because "fewer/no ads" is preferred over "faster page load times"?
        pmontra 7y ago
        Yes. Pages with ads are unreadable. I'm horrified every time I see friends navigate with no adblockers. I always recommend one. I'm going to start recommending Firefox again, as I did at the times of IE6.
      - bscphil 7y ago
        It's also probably entirely random fluctuations in this case. uBlock doesn't add anywhere near that much latency normally.
nwrk 7y ago
Great idea. Kudos for launch. Bookmarked. What striked me is JSHeapTotalSize, never really think the ADs are eating so much RAM / resources (make sense). In Guardian case this accounts for 50% more allocation.
andrerm 7y ago
Great work. Without uBO, Forbes loads 151 cookies.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
merpnderp 7y ago
Quite often I’m getting 2-3x the load times for ublock. https://webtest.app/?url=https://news.ycombinator.com https://webtest.app/?url=https://news.ycombinator.com
- Mathnerd314 7y ago
  It's the same 7 requests, probably a transient effect. E.g. https://webtest.app/?url=https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21052969 https://webtest.app/?url=https://news.ycombinator.com/item?i... is 0.48 vs 0.5. I don't think it lets you retest either, the first run is cached for a long time.
  - nurettin 7y ago
    It would be very hard to retest, not just because of traffic, but also because some websites like amazon.com will throttle you to a halt or start showing captchas if they think you are scraping.
drenvuk 7y ago
I'm stuck in a queue. more workers please, this is awesome.
- bscphil 7y ago
  No sites are loading for me, including the one in the Show HN URL, which ought to be cached. I think we broke the site.
  - aberforth123 7y ago
    Yes sorry, it's tough!
- gchamonlive 7y ago
  Or maybe provide the ability to run it locally. Is it open source and does it have deployment instructions?
NightlyDev 7y ago
Adblockers in chrome are slow. Fast pages goes from having no noticeable delay to having one. Many times the latency is not uncommon. Sure, this is only a problem for really fast pages, but it's still really annoying.
- aberforth123 7y ago
  Check this service, it proofs you wrong
radicalriddler 7y ago
TheGuardian is such a shit site without adblock. During the Australian election, I turned off my adblocker because "they're an independent news source" and I wanted to support their advertisers. I got bombarded with a full width banner at the top, and full height banner down both sides for the national Greens party. Now don't get me wrong, I don't hate the greens party, but god damn, my eyes.
- JetSpiegel 7y ago
  It's much better to donate, at least the correct people get the bulk of the money.
  - jeremija 7y ago
    My wife and I decided to donate one year. Guess what happened next? They sold our data to their partners and we ended receiving so much spam mail in the following few years, we couldn't believe it. These organizations generate so much paper waste, it made us so angry we simply stopped our subscriptions. But we had to wait until we moved out for the spam to stop.
bscphil 7y ago
I found a bug: when I enter a URL into the form it seems to URLencode the characters, but this doesn't work on the site. That is, [1] works, [2] spins on "status: queued" forever. As far as I know I don't have any particular settings or extensions that would cause the URL to be unexpectedly encoded. Edit: it's not doing it right now, which is weird. It was just a moment ago, but maybe it was fixed? I had assumed the backend was down. [1] https://webtest.app/?url=https://bbc.co.uk https://webtest.app/?url=https://bbc.co.uk [2] https://webtest.app/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbbc.co.uk https://webtest.app/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbbc.co.uk
phobonym 7y ago
Nice, I like this. Would be nice if there was a way to display/download all cached results. Would be a nice dataset for visualisation or a dashboard.
stevekemp 7y ago
You need to filter the URLs that are accepted to avoid security problems - had you a contact address on your profile here, or on the site I'd have disclosed this more privately. But consider this case: https://webtest.app/?url=file:///etc/passwd https://webtest.app/?url=file:///etc/passwd In short you should restrict URLs to protocols of `http`, `https`, and even then you should filter based on IP. You don't want people to view http://localhost/server-status http://localhost/server-status, etc. Finally you need to make sure you avoid recursion: https://webtest.app/?url=https://webtest.app/?url=https://steve.fi/ https://webtest.app/?url=https://webtest.app/?url=https://st...
- dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
  > https://webtest.app/?url=file:///etc/passwd https://webtest.app/?url=file:///etc/passwd I find it funny that the app reports even this file loads faster with uBlock.
- aberforth123 7y ago
  Thanks, good find, I fixed it.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
codeisawesome 7y ago
I'm not sure why the code isn't open source on this one. If the OP is hoping that news websites (etc.,) will pay for this service, I wouldn't hold my breath. This site only highlights all the bad things happening on those sites - and the marketing teams there have most likely already been told by their developers what including 1 million cookies & 50 million tracker APIs will do to the performance. They want this gunk in there so that revenue targets can be met. So the best bet is to put this up on GitHub where folks like me could learn from the code :-D
- pygy_ 7y ago
  News sites could use this as a benchmark to ensure that the experience is worse with uBO.
- jcims 7y ago
  You could say the same thing about open sourcing it, if the OP is hoping for useful PRs they would be ill advised to hold their breath. Meanwhile OP now gets spammed with low effort installation and support requests. Maybe open source the worker code, but the whole website?
- aberforth123 7y ago
  Will open source soon, need some refactoring first :).
  - codeisawesome 7y ago
    Thank you:)
- aberforth123 7y ago
  In what way do you think news sites would pay for this service? They want full throttle ads everywhere right, not sure why this service is of any use. They just think: the more header bidding partners putting cookies everywhere the more money
  - codeisawesome 7y ago
nreece 7y ago
Question for the developer: any particular reason you're using Chrome with xvfb rather than just headless. Its been stable for a while.
- aberforth123 7y ago
  You cannot load extensions in headless chrome, so I had to jump some hoops here.
njitram 7y ago
Nice way to see if EU sites are GDPR compliant, because you didn't give consent when hitting a website those websites should not use any external tags yet. You can see for example nos.nl or lemonde.fr are fairly clean, but bbc.com or bild.de are not, even though there is no consent.
gnrlst 7y ago
When I test your own site (webtest.app), it doesn't work. I was hoping for some introspection!
- alpaca128 7y ago
  According to other replies this was a recent change to prevent recursive calls and attempts to access local files on the server.
  - aberforth123 7y ago
    Indeed!
arnley 7y ago
Thanks for sharing this gem. Did you consider computing the Speed Index? [1] It would help assessing the performance impact these ads have. [1] https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/using-webpagetest/metrics/speed-index https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/using-webpag...
a_imho 7y ago
Not using something like ublock is simply bad hygiene.
taf2 7y ago
Interesting to see many sites load faster without uBlock because DOM content loaded is faster... it would be nice if we could run more scientific measurement to get a better understanding of the load time differences.
Rarok 7y ago
Fun, I tried it with a regional newspapper and it doesn't shows the processing and load time in the versiones without adblock. Also I never realized it was SO BAD without adblock https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/ https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/
- aberforth123 7y ago
  I reran it: https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.lavozdegalicia.es https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.lavozdegalicia.es
- aberforth123 7y ago
  Regarding: "Also I never realized it was SO BAD without adblock". That's part of the problem. We techies have no idea what's happening without an ad blocker because we all use one. This service wants to show the unseen.

192 points by aberforth123 7y ago

Excellent way to show the weight of ads and trackers, very clean side by side comparison.

Minor typo on the website: "or to proof to others they should use an ad blocker" (should be "as proof" or "to prove"). Also, suggestion: don't require typing http:// http:// or https:// https://

regnerba 7y ago

Why does the Reddit page get bigger with uBlock Origin? From 2.73 MB on Chrome to 8.48 with uBlock Origin. https://webtest.app/?url=https://reddit.com https://webtest.app/?url=https://reddit.com

danShumway 7y ago
I'm noticing that DomContentLoaded, Processing Time, and Load Time are all blank for Reddit withoutout uBO as well. I'm going to make a mild suggestion that the author double-check their implementation logic. Is it possible that the ad-encumbered page isn't loading before it times out? Or is it possible that without ads the page is loading more content? Even showing something like a comparison screenshot at the end might help in odd cases like this.
- aberforth123 7y ago
  The screenshots didn't even load because the my tiny server ran out of memory when testing Reddit.
aberforth123 7y ago
This was an old result from when the server didn't have enough memory for big sites (especially the version without uBO). I reran it for Reddit, you can see the result on the same URL.

guessmyname 7y ago

YouTube sends more requests with uBlock Origin enabled? [1][2] My theory is, without the ads, there is more space in the webview to load video thumbnails, each item representing a video in the HTML document probably requires a handful of HTTP requests to load and pre-fetch their corresponding metadata. I would not be surprised if other websites react in the same way. I hope this is the case, but I am suspicious enough that I will investigate further how the ad-blocker affects these websites. [1] https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.youtube.com https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.youtube.com [2] https://i.imgur.com/HBB4TkK.png https://i.imgur.com/HBB4TkK.png

ambicapter 7y ago
If you look at the thumbnail of the web page seems like this would be the case.
SpaceManiac 7y ago
This is the case. With an addon that deletes most but not all homepage items or sidebar recommendations, YouTube does some noticeable spinning trying to fill the space which keeps getting emptied.

jackewiehose 7y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com takes a second longer with uBlock

kgwxd 7y ago
That means HN is doing things the right way :)
- SwiftyBug 7y ago
  How is it so?
  - dvh 7y ago
    Page A loads content for X seconds and Z seconds loads ads. uBlock overhead is Y second but saves Z seconds by blocking ads. Total time with uBlock is X+Y-Z. If page has zero ads the time will be X+Y-0 which is greater than X+0.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - drusepth 7y ago
      Just to clarify, this is desirable because "fewer/no ads" is preferred over "faster page load times"?
      - pmontra 7y ago
        Yes. Pages with ads are unreadable. I'm horrified every time I see friends navigate with no adblockers. I always recommend one. I'm going to start recommending Firefox again, as I did at the times of IE6.
    - bscphil 7y ago
      It's also probably entirely random fluctuations in this case. uBlock doesn't add anywhere near that much latency normally.

nwrk 7y ago

Great idea. Kudos for launch. Bookmarked. What striked me is JSHeapTotalSize, never really think the ADs are eating so much RAM / resources (make sense). In Guardian case this accounts for 50% more allocation.

andrerm 7y ago

Great work. Without uBO, Forbes loads 151 cookies.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

merpnderp 7y ago

Quite often I’m getting 2-3x the load times for ublock. https://webtest.app/?url=https://news.ycombinator.com https://webtest.app/?url=https://news.ycombinator.com

Mathnerd314 7y ago
It's the same 7 requests, probably a transient effect. E.g. https://webtest.app/?url=https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21052969 https://webtest.app/?url=https://news.ycombinator.com/item?i... is 0.48 vs 0.5. I don't think it lets you retest either, the first run is cached for a long time.
- nurettin 7y ago
  It would be very hard to retest, not just because of traffic, but also because some websites like amazon.com will throttle you to a halt or start showing captchas if they think you are scraping.

drenvuk 7y ago

I'm stuck in a queue. more workers please, this is awesome.

bscphil 7y ago
No sites are loading for me, including the one in the Show HN URL, which ought to be cached. I think we broke the site.
- aberforth123 7y ago
  Yes sorry, it's tough!
gchamonlive 7y ago
Or maybe provide the ability to run it locally. Is it open source and does it have deployment instructions?

NightlyDev 7y ago

Adblockers in chrome are slow. Fast pages goes from having no noticeable delay to having one. Many times the latency is not uncommon. Sure, this is only a problem for really fast pages, but it's still really annoying.

aberforth123 7y ago
Check this service, it proofs you wrong

radicalriddler 7y ago

TheGuardian is such a shit site without adblock. During the Australian election, I turned off my adblocker because "they're an independent news source" and I wanted to support their advertisers. I got bombarded with a full width banner at the top, and full height banner down both sides for the national Greens party. Now don't get me wrong, I don't hate the greens party, but god damn, my eyes.

JetSpiegel 7y ago
It's much better to donate, at least the correct people get the bulk of the money.
- jeremija 7y ago
  My wife and I decided to donate one year. Guess what happened next? They sold our data to their partners and we ended receiving so much spam mail in the following few years, we couldn't believe it. These organizations generate so much paper waste, it made us so angry we simply stopped our subscriptions. But we had to wait until we moved out for the spam to stop.

bscphil 7y ago

I found a bug: when I enter a URL into the form it seems to URLencode the characters, but this doesn't work on the site. That is, [1] works, [2] spins on "status: queued" forever. As far as I know I don't have any particular settings or extensions that would cause the URL to be unexpectedly encoded. Edit: it's not doing it right now, which is weird. It was just a moment ago, but maybe it was fixed? I had assumed the backend was down. [1] https://webtest.app/?url=https://bbc.co.uk https://webtest.app/?url=https://bbc.co.uk [2] https://webtest.app/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbbc.co.uk https://webtest.app/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbbc.co.uk

phobonym 7y ago

Nice, I like this. Would be nice if there was a way to display/download all cached results. Would be a nice dataset for visualisation or a dashboard.

stevekemp 7y ago

You need to filter the URLs that are accepted to avoid security problems - had you a contact address on your profile here, or on the site I'd have disclosed this more privately. But consider this case: https://webtest.app/?url=file:///etc/passwd https://webtest.app/?url=file:///etc/passwd In short you should restrict URLs to protocols of `http`, `https`, and even then you should filter based on IP. You don't want people to view http://localhost/server-status http://localhost/server-status, etc. Finally you need to make sure you avoid recursion: https://webtest.app/?url=https://webtest.app/?url=https://steve.fi/ https://webtest.app/?url=https://webtest.app/?url=https://st...

dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
> https://webtest.app/?url=file:///etc/passwd https://webtest.app/?url=file:///etc/passwd I find it funny that the app reports even this file loads faster with uBlock.
aberforth123 7y ago
Thanks, good find, I fixed it.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

codeisawesome 7y ago

I'm not sure why the code isn't open source on this one. If the OP is hoping that news websites (etc.,) will pay for this service, I wouldn't hold my breath. This site only highlights all the bad things happening on those sites - and the marketing teams there have most likely already been told by their developers what including 1 million cookies & 50 million tracker APIs will do to the performance. They want this gunk in there so that revenue targets can be met. So the best bet is to put this up on GitHub where folks like me could learn from the code :-D

pygy_ 7y ago
News sites could use this as a benchmark to ensure that the experience is worse with uBO.
jcims 7y ago
You could say the same thing about open sourcing it, if the OP is hoping for useful PRs they would be ill advised to hold their breath. Meanwhile OP now gets spammed with low effort installation and support requests. Maybe open source the worker code, but the whole website?
aberforth123 7y ago
Will open source soon, need some refactoring first :).
- codeisawesome 7y ago
  Thank you:)
aberforth123 7y ago
In what way do you think news sites would pay for this service? They want full throttle ads everywhere right, not sure why this service is of any use. They just think: the more header bidding partners putting cookies everywhere the more money
- codeisawesome 7y ago

nreece 7y ago

Question for the developer: any particular reason you're using Chrome with xvfb rather than just headless. Its been stable for a while.

aberforth123 7y ago
You cannot load extensions in headless chrome, so I had to jump some hoops here.

njitram 7y ago

Nice way to see if EU sites are GDPR compliant, because you didn't give consent when hitting a website those websites should not use any external tags yet. You can see for example nos.nl or lemonde.fr are fairly clean, but bbc.com or bild.de are not, even though there is no consent.

gnrlst 7y ago

When I test your own site (webtest.app), it doesn't work. I was hoping for some introspection!

alpaca128 7y ago
According to other replies this was a recent change to prevent recursive calls and attempts to access local files on the server.
- aberforth123 7y ago
  Indeed!

arnley 7y ago

Thanks for sharing this gem. Did you consider computing the Speed Index? [1] It would help assessing the performance impact these ads have. [1] https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/using-webpagetest/metrics/speed-index https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/using-webpag...

a_imho 7y ago

Not using something like ublock is simply bad hygiene.

taf2 7y ago

Interesting to see many sites load faster without uBlock because DOM content loaded is faster... it would be nice if we could run more scientific measurement to get a better understanding of the load time differences.

Rarok 7y ago

Fun, I tried it with a regional newspapper and it doesn't shows the processing and load time in the versiones without adblock. Also I never realized it was SO BAD without adblock https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/ https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/

aberforth123 7y ago
I reran it: https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.lavozdegalicia.es https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.lavozdegalicia.es
aberforth123 7y ago
Regarding: "Also I never realized it was SO BAD without adblock". That's part of the problem. We techies have no idea what's happening without an ad blocker because we all use one. This service wants to show the unseen.