38 ms·

Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs

• shpx 12y ago
  People are using µBlock now for precisely this reason. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/%C2%B5Block-vs.-ABP:-efficiency-compared https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/%C2%B5Block-vs.-ABP:-... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/%C2%B5block/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/%C2%B5block/cjpalh... https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
  • ddorian43 12y ago
    it probably needs a better way to whitelist sites/pages
    • gorhill 12y ago
      I frankly don't know how to improve on clicking the big fat green button in the popup to whitelist a site (Ctrl-click for a specific page).
      • ddorian43 12y ago
        sorry, i never hovered on it. thanks
      • pjlegato 12y ago
        It's not at all obvious what that button does. The icon is typically associated with "power on/off." While I can see how this is supposed to suggest whitelisting in an abstract and metaphoric sense, making that connection is a bit of a stretch, particularly for casual users. I suggest removing the icon and just putting a plain old checkbox with a label that says "Whitelist Site".
        • _asummers 12y ago
          If you hover over it, it tells you exactly what it does.
          • lomnakkus 12y ago
            "hover over it to find out what it does" does not constitute good UX unless you're talking about a toolbar with a multitude of icons which cannot all (by sheer numbers) be "intuitive".
            • _asummers 12y ago
              I'm not claiming it's the best UX, and I have no particular affinity to this program, but it's really not hard to tell what it does, especially for the demographic here.
              • lomnakkus 12y ago
                Nor do I have any particular affiliation or affinity. It just sounds like poor UX/UI. I guess the whole "hover over it if you're confused" thing is pretty established by now, so I'd say your original assessment is probably the correct one. I just want us (the industry) to get better at this stuff! :)
                • _asummers 12y ago
                  Fair enough; that's totally reasonable, and I agree with you. I guess I just had an objection to the post I originally replied to which (seemingly) had the attitude of it being impossible to tell what the button did. The UX could certainly be better, but it's not bad.
              • Zuider 12y ago
                Yes, but it is not intuitively obvious for the ordinary user who would account for the majority of page views and potential advertising revenue.
        • 12y ago
  • elvis635 12y ago
    Together with umatrix (https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/ https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/) are the best chrome extensions Since I went back to firefox those are the only extensions I really miss, there is policeman (https://github.com/futpib/policeman/ https://github.com/futpib/policeman/) but it's not as good as them yet To whoever develop extensions, please don't focus only on chrome, firefox during the last months has become must better that it was before, if developers only consider chrome, people will eventually migrate to it and firefox will die. Even though chromium is open it won't be good for the ecosystem
    • gcommer 12y ago
      I use NoScript and RequestPolicy for full white listing functionality in Firefox.
    • Nexxxeh 12y ago
      As my paranoia ramps up year on year, I now use Opera with µBlock. For me, it has the polish of Chrome with some nice extras, but without the increasingly creepy Googality. It works fine, although I've not tried µMatrix. (I have my defaults changed to DuckDuckGo. Usually connecting via a VPN.) I've whitelisted a few sites I like to support (a couple of webcomics, HaD etc). I have a lot of filters: "62,501 network filters ＋ 40,728 cosmetic filters". Opera's task manager says the extension is taking up a mere 32MB. Probably not accurate, but a lot better AdBlock (my previous favourite). Off-topic but I wish people would stop using Mu for project names. Where is the Mu key on the keyboard? I have to copy and paste or alt-code it. Call the project microBlock or something! They use "u" instead of "µ" on Github, so why not just use something else entirely? µTorrent was the one that really irritated me because I couldn't type "utorr" to search for it on my start menu. I'd say something to gorhill (albeit far more politely), but it seems childish and ungrateful. He's clearly poured so much time and effort into making such useful software. "Great software but the name is fucking annoying, mate!"
      • gorhill 12y ago
        I myself most often write "uBlock" and pronounce "you-block", as in "users decide". I originally used the mu character in place of the u to emphasize smaller resource footprint relative to similar solutions out there. I've never been good with picking name etc., unfortunately now we are stuck with it.
  • aluhut 12y ago
    Too bad its's not for Firefox
    • Squarex 12y ago
      Someone is working on it there https://github.com/Deathamns/uBlock https://github.com/Deathamns/uBlock. There is also experimental xpi https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/27 https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/27.
      • aluhut 12y ago
        Fantastic! Thank you :)
    • pwr22 12y ago
      I use Bluhell Firewall, it isn't as good as ABP but it is definitely better than nothing and so light
  • kyriakos 12y ago
    I tried µBlock but it seems to be extremely trigger happy. For example Youtube front page doesn't show any videos and Facebook doesn't load at all (basically it blocks everything other than its side bar). I can obviously white list those sites but my concern is that next time I visit some site for the first time I will not know if its broken or just µBlock acting up. ----- EDIT I reinstalled the plugin and the problems went away. So far looks good.
    • gorhill 12y ago
      > Youtube front page doesn't show any videos I see videos all fine on Youtube front-page, using out-of-the-box filter lists. That kind of issue was never reported for uBlock. I would need to know exactly what filter lists you were using, including custom filters. uBlock relies on 3rd-party filter lists to do the job, specifically, out of the box: - EasyList - EasyPrivacy - Fanboy's Social Blocking List - Peter Lowe's Ad Servers - Malware domains So if you think it blocks too much, un-select the filter lists you do not want. Bottom line, whatever filter lists you use in uBlock, you will get the same results with the same lists with ABP.
      • vosper 12y ago
        I haven't tried ublock yet, is it obvious how to work back from a broken page to figure out which blacklists need adjusting? I'd also recommend that the defaults should have YouTube and Facebook (at least) working out of the box. Otherwise I think people will just uninstall the plugin, rather than trying to figure out how to fix it, which would be a shame.
        • deleted 12y ago
          [deleted]
        • mijoharas 12y ago
          Having just tried uBlock, the defaults do allow both Youtube and Facebook to work out of the box (and exactly the same as with adblock, as far as I can tell). I think the poster must've had some other problem. (or maybe some of the filter lists changed in between his problem and my trying it, which is equally possible) EDIT: ( Chrome 39.0.2171.95 (64-bit), linux )
  • reledi 12y ago
    Thanks, haven't heard of uBlock until now. Giving it a try.
  • logn 12y ago
    In some tests, uBlock results in the browser using less memory than with no plugins: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Firefox-version:-benchmarking-memory-footprint-of-the-early-preview https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Firefox-version:-benc... n.b. Firefox results from experimental patch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8802509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8802509
    • tim333 12y ago
      That was my experience. My usage for four pages was about 80M with uBlock, 120M with AdBlock Pro and 200M with nothing. Pages also took like 1s to load with the blockers and 12s without because of all the ad junk loading. (with Chrome)
  • gorhill 12y ago
    One thing I would like to point out, is that there is a bug currently in Chromium 39 which causes a new memory leak each time the popup UI of an extension is opened: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=441500 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=441500 This affects all extensions. Just so people are informed memory figures won't be too reliable as soon as you opened even only once the popup UI of an extension. (In all my benchmarks I of course avoided to do this).
    • curiously 12y ago
      does this happen only when you click the ublock and it opens a popup window or with any extension popup UI?
      • gorhill 12y ago
        Any extension popup UI, which appears when you click an extension icon. The more complicated the HTML document in the popup, the larger the leak.
        • curiously 12y ago
          what about extensions without a popup UI?
  • crishoj 12y ago
    For those using Safari, there is a preliminary version of µBlock here: http://chrisly.me/0B0s2Y2Y3b0R http://chrisly.me/0B0s2Y2Y3b0R Note: No automatic updates with this unofficial build.
    • Logmix 12y ago
      Impressive, it's already much much faster than AdBlock.
  • codexon 12y ago
    I find ublock breaks many more websites than ABP. I usually wouldn't notice a broken website with ABP, but with ublock I see something wrong at least once a week.
    • chii 12y ago
      iirc, ublock also blocks api.google.com (i guess it's the analytics javascript files?), which incidentally, also breaks a lot of sites that uses the google common javascript library CDN (which servers stuff like jquery etc). I whitelisted it and it seems to unbreak some stuff.
      • gorhill 12y ago
        > ublock also blocks api.google.com There is no filter which matches "api.google.com", so this can't be blocked, unless you have a custom filter which does that. > also breaks a lot of sites that uses the google common javascript library CDN uBlock uses third-party filter lists such as EasyList, EasyPrivacy, Peter Lowe's, etc. It won't block more than what is spelled out in these lists. Un-select whatever filter lists which you think should not be selected. As I have said countless times now, uBlock will block as much as ABP blocks when using same filter lists. As always, if you think something is blocked which should not be (for example if ABP with the same lists has a different behavior), I need a URL, a test case in order to be able to infirm/confirm that the problem is with uBlock and not with the filter lists. On that ground, uBlock has been quite stable for a while now, I don't remember the last time something was blocked which should not have been blocked (or vice versa) as per filter lists.
  • nXqd 12y ago
    thanks for pointing out :)
  • hoers 12y ago
    Thank you so much for these!
  • edwinyzh 12y ago
    Thanks for the recommendation! Long time ago I've uninstalled AdBlock due to the noticeable performance issue and have been suffering the ads on the news websites, will now try uBlock.
  • kokonotu 12y ago
    Thanks! This is my first time to hear about µBlock. I have uninstalled ABP to use µBlock to see if there are any difference.
  • webwanderings 12y ago
    I desperately need ublock for mobile.
• foxhill 12y ago
  being a.. "tech" person, i always get grief from people when i tell them i don't use adblock. "you should know better" or words to that effect. this would explain why i've never considered chrome to be a memory hog.. (although, all my machines have a lot of memory, too)
• lukastsai 12y ago
  a mobile readable version: https://getscroll.com/r/mdqbs https://getscroll.com/r/mdqbs I'm using https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock to replace Adblock plus since last week.
• elorant 12y ago
  I’d rather pay a few dozen bucks to buy more RAM than running the risk of been infected by malware served from compromised ad servers. Not to mention the significant decrease in aesthetics/usability when pages include a dozen different ad areas.
  • Kiro 12y ago
    I don't know about aesthetics. I've found that AdBlock actually destroys a lot of the symmetry since the page was designed with ad elements in place.
    • drey08 12y ago
      That could actually be a novel technique against ad blocking. Make the website dysfunctional if the ads can't be displayed.
      • ianlevesque 12y ago
        Yeah, having an option to pay for the site instead would just be crazy.
        • ferrari8608 12y ago
          Having to pay to visit all of the sites out there which are currently using ads would pretty much ruin the internet for most people. Having a big banner at the top asking for donations seems to work rather well, though. See gnu.org and wikipedia.org for examples (though Wikipedia's donation campaign this year is a bit excessive IMO).
          • w1ntermute 12y ago
            FYI, you can hide the Wikipedia donation campaign banners by putting this in a userscript that @matches http://*.wikipedia.org/* http://*.wikipedia.org/*: setTimeout(function() { fundraisingBanner.hide(); }, 1000);
• ddorian43 12y ago
  Isn't using 200MB for a webpage(techcrunch) actually bad in the first place ? Do all designers work on their iExpensiveMachine and don't care about other peoples lower-end machines/phones/tables/whatever?
  • rtpg 12y ago
    this is mainly due to having many images on your website (memory can store uncompressed images to save CPU cycles when rendering) Also, last I checked, most phones have 1 to 2 gigs of RAM, and they're not keeping many tabs in memory. If the RAM is there, using it is not really an issue (until you start getting into the whole virtual memory stuff I guess)
    • ZanyProgrammer 12y ago
      Every iDevice other than the iPad Air 2 has only 1GB of ram, and that's an issue for them (source: search every mention of the iPad Air and RAM, especially since the Air 2 came out).
    • awalton 12y ago
      > this is mainly due to having many images on your website (memory can store uncompressed images to save CPU cycles when rendering) If your webpage has that many images, you need to redesign your webpage. An uncompressed image at my screen resolution is 21MB - your webpage needs ten times that in memory? For maybe 500 words of prose and some meme/cat picture? Modern web design is just so bad that they can't help themselves from this madness. A modern webpage needs 10+ iframes? Absolutely bullshit.
      • tracker1 12y ago
        Well, considering I work at a car classifieds site, and there are usually about 20 photos that may be on any given page, and in the new search boxes will be even bigger, and with retina screens wanting 2x images, I'd say yes.. there are sites that really need that much space for images. Not that all or most do.. but there are a lot of really nice sites that use a lot of large images for full content display. Other techniques can be used to reserve space and load when a section comes into view, but that's not always prudent. Images are crucial, and optimizing your rendering is also becoming more crucial.. just the same, not everything on the web is text.. and I'd say people spend more time on the web looking at pictures than text, not to mention video.
• jmgtan 12y ago
  I've been using GlimmerBlock for quite sometime without running into issues
• girishso 12y ago
  I have switched to HTTP Switchboard, works pretty well. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/http-switchboard/mghdpehejfekicfjcdbfofhcmnjhgaag?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/http-switchboard/m...
  • elvis635 12y ago
    You should migrate to umatrix (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/%C2%B5matrix/ogfcmafjalglgifnmanfmnieipoejdcf https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/%C2%B5matrix/ogfcm...), http switchboard is not maintained anymore
    • hrjet 12y ago
      uMatrix is new and improved, and I use it sometimes, but it is still rough around the edges. Some websites don't work and there's no work-around. Edit: To clarify, the above is in comparison to HTTPSB.
      • gorhill 12y ago
        From the doc: "µMatrix does not guarantee that sites will work fine: it is for advanced users who can figure how to un-break sites, because essentially µMatrix is a firewall which works in block-all/allow-exceptionally mode out of the box: it is not unexpected that sites will break" Workaround is to un-block whatever net requests which are causing a site to break. I can't make sense of "no work-around": unblock everything? Edit: There is a scope-based switch to completely turn off matrix filtering.
        • hrjet 12y ago
          Hi, I am well aware of the matrix and a fan (have been a HTTPSB user and now test uMatrix sometimes). I am also a contributor to https://gngr.info https://gngr.info which has a Request Manager inspired by the matrix. I was referring to a few issues I encounter in uMatrix which are not present in HTTPSB. I probably should log them; was not sure if uMatrix is ready for full-time use yet.
• bourbon 12y ago
  I use Ghost and Adblock+ with Chromium, and I've never had an issue with memory.
• insin 12y ago
  > Here’s a lovely bit of irony for you: Adblock Plus... is actually increasing the amount of memory used by your web browser, rather than decreasing it It’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.
• jim_greco 12y ago
  I wish the internet was usable without it.
  • megalodon 12y ago
    This. The ongoing arms race between advertisers and adblockers damage content delivery, which is why I'm hoping for a solution which can replace ads in the near future. Maybe Google Contributor is onto something. I would recommend trying the Reader view in Safari (I'm sure there's similar functionality in other browsers) to read articles without clutter. Works like a charm.
    • briandear 12y ago
      Reader is especially killer in mobile. A huge percentage of sites are incredible horrible on mobile-- and it isn't even the ads as much as all of the sharing, pull quotes and modals. Why the heck do people have modals for mobile? The insanity of it.
• neals 12y ago
  I used to not do Adblock, because you know, ads make the internet go round and all that. But with the "download here"-button ads, there is no way to know what button to press anymore. Now installing Adblock is a requirement.
  • zo1 12y ago
    I got tricked once by one of those while on Sourceforge. Words can not describe how annoyed I was that day.
    • jackmaney 12y ago
      Thankfully, we shouldn't see GitHub pulling any shit like that anytime soon (or if they do, I won't be able to see it, as I use Adblock Plus...).
    • nandhp 12y ago
      And if you try to download Windows binaries from Sourceforge, your download may be enhanced with WinZip, the Ask.com toolbar, and other optional offers. http://www.ghacks.net/2013/07/17/sourceforges-new-installer-bundles-program-downloads-with-adware/ http://www.ghacks.net/2013/07/17/sourceforges-new-installer-...
      • benbristow 12y ago
        This is a nice little app recently developed that can help you out with those 'installers'. http://unchecky.com/ http://unchecky.com/
        • nitrogen 12y ago
          In many cases it's not the program authors that added those installers, but SourceForge and/or its mirrors.
  • vacri 12y ago
    Flashblock is my middleground. The advertisers can have images, but the worst offenders are the Flash ads, and they get blocked.
• zo1 12y ago
  From the article: >"* The main problem, though, is the process by which ABP actually blocks ads. Basically, ABP inserts a massive CSS stylesheet — occupying around 4MB of RAM — into every single webpage that you visit, stripping out the ads.*" Isn't then the actual problem the way that Adblock+ removes the ads? Why not simply allow an API for a plugin to easily strip content from a site. If there is one already, then ABP should switch to it to reduce memory usage. If not, well then we should look at the actual culprits of this problem which is the browsers.
  • deanclatworthy 12y ago
    In chrome at least it's not in Google's interest to block their customers ads, or make it any easier to do so.
  • notduncansmith 12y ago
    Well, plugins are allowed to run Javascript on the page, what other kind of "special API" would you need?
• jacquesm 12y ago
  He's definitely on to something here, FF with a hundred or so tabs open: With ABP: 12961 XXXXXX 20 0 2615960 1.483g 58692 S 45.2 9.5 2:13.00 firefox Without: 13098 XXXXXX 20 0 2157212 1.109g 57476 R 142.6 7.1 1:26.25 firefox Both after a complete stop and start of the browser, restoring every tab by activating it.
  • VLM 12y ago
    This provides an engineering anecdote that adblocking is worth more than half a gig to a large fraction of the population. Looking at prices on tigerdirect you're dropping about $10 per gig (I'm sure apple charges $200 per gig for laptops, but they're price insensitive so don't matter). Anyway that provides a data point that ad blocking is worth at least $5 to the average user. Also from a scaling perspective I wonder if its linear with tabs. There are various tribes of tab users and if its linear, a "normal user" who uses about 3 or so would scale down to approximately nil.
    • jacquesm 12y ago
      I don't think I'm a 'normal' user, having a 100 or so tabs open is actually idle time for me. When I'm busy it can be three times as much.
      • briandear 12y ago
        Three hundred tabs! Perhaps you might enjoy a cool feature called bookmarking. How do you keep track of them all? I get to 10 tabs before my Sheldon Cooper kicks in.
        • jacquesm 12y ago
          I use bookmarks too. The way it works is that while I read I open up links and make notes as I work my way through a page, by the time I'm done there is a few lines added to the notebook and maybe a few new tabs open. Little by little I exhaust the subject and at some point all the links on the subject are already visited. A bit like a human crawler. But the peaks in the middle are easily in the 100's of tabs. This is the most efficient way that I've found, bookmarking works but then you will still need to open those bookmarks later, much easier to just open the tab right away. It's very much a paper analogy, highlight the interesting bits, add new stuff to the 'to read' stack, and when the 'to read' stack is empty you're done and the notes file contains the extracted information. The note taking extension I use is called scrapbook and I couldn't live without it. I also use vertical tabs which makes it much easier to work with large numbers of tabs.
• MicroBerto 12y ago
  People aren't using Adblock to conserve resources. They're using it to block ads and most are willing to take a performance hit to do so.
  • gorhill 12y ago
    The idea that you have to choose between a blocker or resources has become common unfortunately. It's unfortunate because this idea being held as a premise by so many users kind of give a free pass to developers to not work harder to improve their code.
  • njloof 12y ago
    That's not why I started using Adblock. I started because the web became unusable on an older machine (5 years). The content wasn't any more sophisticated but it soaked up all the resources (CPU, RAM etc.) available. Imagine if you had a PDF reader that ran at 100% CPU and swapped all the time!
    • personZ 12y ago
      Indeed, the post you replied to is not based in actual reality. The entire foundation of the adblock industry was an aggressive attention-war plied by the ad business, where soon webpages were an armed conflict of aggressive ads each imposing even more of a tax. No one expected the cure to be worse than the disease. I couldn't believe it somewhat recently when I had to use an older laptop to find that simply running Chrome was completely untenable if ABP was installed.
    • otis_inf 12y ago
      I have an atom dual core small PC connected to my TV (it runs windows 7, yeah I know) and it's 'ok-ish' with performance, but starting a browser is a tad slow (chrome) and adblock makes it even slower as it's a plugin which is particularly slow to start. So I don't think blocking ads for performance reasons on slow machines is still cutting it if you take into account the performance penalty of abp. All things considered however, it's IMHO a small price to pay for having the freedom to decide which content is fetched during page rendering and thus which services won't know whether you're visiting a certain webpage.
• efbbbf 12y ago
  For Firefox, there's Bluhell Firewall https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/bluhell-firewall/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/bluhell-firew...
  • deleted 12y ago
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  • deleted 12y ago
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• thegeomaster 12y ago
  I can completely agree with this. I have a shitty machine with 2GB RAM and it's more often than not that it freezes almost completely when I compile bigg(ish) projects because it hits swap. I keep my Firefox open all the time (who doesn't?) and since I disabled AdBlock Plus this wasn't an issue anymore, and from 1.2GB Firefox's resident set size has plummeted to 500MB for me.
• pmelendez 12y ago
  I do not use and Ad Blocker and Firefox and Chrome always devour my RAM. I can't imagine how worse would be with a Adblocker
• psykovsky 12y ago
  I prefer the hosts file way of redirecting ad/tracking domains to localhost. There are some nice hosts lists already compiled, which you can download to make your own. The resources problem simply went away when I started doing it this way.
• deleted 12y ago
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• agumonkey 12y ago
  I often send URL to printfriendly, most of the time it's light, readable and ads-free. Works with Firefox keyword tags (added manually) and with Chrom* urlbar (added automatically after a few visits).
• mbrock 12y ago
  I once did some profiling on a heavy single page app and found that the overhead of AdBlock+'s extreme amount of CSS selectors was a major culprit.
• gondo 12y ago
  what about forking chromium and integrating adblock directly in the browser? +removing all the google nonsense (like disabled cross domain security for some google domains)
  • sup 12y ago
    Check out Iron http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php
• dendory 12y ago
  What kind of fucked up site has 10+ iframes per page, let alone hundreds? And the example site he uses takes 530megs to load even without addons. I'm sensing the issue is somewhere other than Adblock Plus.
  • gorhill 12y ago
    The "fucked up" case highlights the fact that ABP injects 14,000+ CSS rules (with only EasyList) in every page and iframes on a page. You could as well ask "What kind of fucked up add-on unconditionally injects minimum of 14K+ CSS rules per page? (assuming no iframe)". The original point is that the approach is detrimental to Firefox the browser regardless of that stress test, and I can understand very well Firefox developers wanting to raise the issue [1], as the browser ends up taking the blame when resources are abused. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=988266 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=988266
  • jasonthevillain 12y ago
    Actually, that's not crazy. Ads, social widgets (the Facebook Like button), third party comment boxes, etc. all render in iframes.
    • oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
      No, they may render in iframes; iframes are certainly not a requirement for any of those features, and some (the original commenter included, I suspect) might consider them a heavy-handed approach to the problem.
      • aboodman 12y ago
        iframes are the only unit of isolation on the web. Unless you want the like button you're hosting to have complete unrestricted access to your application's private data, then yeah, the like button needs to be in an iframe.
        • oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
• 0dmethz 12y ago
  Use AdBlock. Not AdBlock Plus. Remember: ABP = Shit. AB = Good.
  • Nexxxeh 12y ago
    Or, if you're using Chrome/Chromium/Opera, try uBlock: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock I use AdBlock on one machine and uBlock on the other, both in Opera. I've not noticed any real difference in unattended use, except uBlock seems to use less resources.
  • noselasd 12y ago
    Well, ABP has "acceptable ads" turned on by default , but Adblock is pretty much just worse in every way.. Here's a few items from the changelog before they moved to a closed development mode AdBlock 2.6.11 (2013-10-25): The AdBlock feature which sends a unique user ID to the AdBlock server every day has been extended. The server can now decide that the user should see a survey — this one is being opened in a new tab, immediately, no matter what the user is doing right now. AdBlock 2.6.14 (2013-11-09): AdBlock won’t just send a unique user ID to its server now, it will also transmit user’s setting determining whether Google Search ads are allowed. AdBlock 2.6.29 (2014-04-28): The “AdBlock custom filters” (AdBlock-specific filter list that is installed by default and listed as recommended) add a set of filters to whitelist Mixpanel tracking on the AdBlock website. AdBlock 2.7 (2014-06-06): Also, AdBlock will tell getadblock.com whether AdBlock has just been installed or has been used for a while
  • Trellmor 12y ago
    Or use Adblock Edge https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/ which is a Adblock Plus fork minus the "acceptable ads" feature.
    • kasabali 12y ago
      ...which is based on outdated code base.
• legulere 12y ago
  I don't even use an adblocker. I simply use ghostery to block trackers and almost no ads being there anymore is a nice side-effect.
  • atoponce 12y ago
    Ghostery is proprietary software, and it's reporting your usage back to trackers if you enable Ghostrank. You would be better protected running Privacy Badger by the EFF. It's Free Software, and it doesn't track you. https://www.eff.org/privacybadger https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
    • MikeKusold 12y ago
      > Although we like Disconnect, Adblock Plus, Ghostery and similar products (in fact Privacy Badger is based on the ABP code!) Privacy Badger most likely has the same issue that this article is talking about.
      • atoponce 12y ago
        Curious, I checked out the Task Manager for my Chromium install. Privacy Badger, although based on ABP code, is using substantially less memory than uBlock. Less than 1/2, actually. https://imgur.com/ScBfmjS https://imgur.com/ScBfmjS
      • atoponce 12y ago
        Privacy Badger isn't a recommendation to reduce CPU and memory usage. It's a recommendation to use in place of Ghostery. Because it is based on ABP, it may certainly have some of the bloat issues uBlock is trying to address.
      • kasabali 12y ago
        The problem is not Adblock Plus engine, it's ABP injecting 4 MB CSS to every single page, while Privacy Badger doesn't, so it is not a problem.
        • 12y ago
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• mmgutz 12y ago
  Noscript is not an option anymore. Too many sites rely on javascript. I'll take the memory hit every time to use adblock.
  • _JamesA_ 12y ago
    I would counter and say NoScript is still an option. I want to control what sites I allow to execute scripts in my browser rather than give global authority to any random site I may happen to land on. I see no value in allowing scripts from Facebook or Twitter, for example, to run on any of the sites I visit.
    • jccalhoun 12y ago
      I would agree with the op that noscript is not an option any more but only because I think the widespread use of javascript makes it mandatory for sane web use.
  • gorhill 12y ago
    Blocking scripts is still a good habit. Many web sites requires scripts to work properly, but then for many web sites a lot of users won't really care whether all the "features" work, so long as they display the important content just fine. For example, for someone just wanting to casually browse on random web sites, blocking 3rd-party scripts/frames is no hurdle, as the important content most of the time can be viewed. Examples: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-Benefits-of-blocking-3rd-party-script-and-iframe-tags https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-Be...
  • wtallis 12y ago
    Blocking third-party scripts while allowing first-party scripts works just fine on most sites. You may have to whitelist several CDN domains, but you can blacklist the ad network domains and get most of the benefits.
  • ww520 12y ago
    I use Yesscript, which allows blacklisting of specific sites.
• kasabali 12y ago
  Previous discussion (and a related one): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743064 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743064 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7765758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7765758
• snird 12y ago
  I'm using Ghostery as a privacy and ad-blocking extension. Does anyone have data on the impact Ghostery might have on the browser memory usage?
  • atoponce 12y ago
    I don't have data on Ghostery memory/CPU usage, but I would offer this warning: Ghostery is proprietary software, and is "calling home" on your usage when you enable Ghostrank. Ghostrank is used to build profiles on who is blocking what, and when, so they can sell this data to advertisers and trackers. Which just seems hypocritical to me. To be fair, Ghostrank is disabled, and opt-in by default. Instead, I think you may be better protected by running Privacy Badger by the EFF. It's Free Software and it isn't tracking you. https://www.eff.org/privacybadger https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
    • aroch 12y ago
      It is not "calling home" if you enable the collection... Privacy Badger isn't nearly as effective as Ghostery. Regarding Ghostrank -- isn't it better that ad companies learn to create non-intrusive, acceptable ads so that we don't have to rely on adblockers everywhere and can actually give sites their ad-revenue?
      • atoponce 12y ago
        I would prefer that ad companies learn to create non-intrusive ads. I've been hoping for this for the past 15 years. Sadly, no progress is being made here.
      • atoponce 12y ago
        Oh, also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Criticism
        • aroch 12y ago
          That's literally a rehash of the FUD in your parent post.
• 101914 12y ago
  I use DNS to block ads when control over the HOSTS file is not available to the user. Works across all applications, e.g. browsers, apps, and requires no installation of third party software e.g. extensions. I'm curious: do these ad blocking "solutions" operate as businesses? Do ad servers pay to be removed from blacklists? Pardon my ignorance.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
• atoponce 12y ago
  It's nice, but it seems to be a bit overly aggressive. As an example, it's removing the "Share to Twitter" button on my TT-RSS install.
• arthurk 12y ago
  I've been using http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ for almost a year now and it works very well. No need for adblock.
• ghantila 12y ago
  I uninstalled right after hearing from Mozilla [1] about the effects of AdBlock Plus on Firefox. Since, then I'm blocking things manually. First I was using this [2] hosts file by Dan Pallock. But now I've switched to this Neocities [3] hosted site. I don't know who manages this site, but the entries are uniquely sorted from various sources, which includes entries from Dan Pallock's hosts file. Apart from this, I use Privacy Badger [4], Self-Destructing Cookies [5], HTTPS-Everywhere [6] and Disconnect [7]. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-pluss-effect-on-firefoxs-memory-usage/ https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-plus... [2] http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ [3] https://hosts.neocities.org/ https://hosts.neocities.org/ [4] https://www.eff.org/privacybadger https://www.eff.org/privacybadger [5] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destructing-cookies/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destruct... [6] https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere [7] https://disconnect.me/ https://disconnect.me/
  • ExpiredLink 12y ago
    > But now I've switched to this Neocities [3] hosted site. This file is far too large and may cause DNS cache problems on Windows.
  • pwr22 12y ago
    I switched from ABP to Bluhell Firewall and FF is like a different browser wrt memory
  • drdaeman 12y ago
    There's also a Policeman [1] that works using fast and powerful domain-and-request-type matching. No thousands of injected CSS rules or anything like this, that persist and consume memory. Think of hosts file on steroids, that's able to differentiate between image, script and flash requests. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/policeman/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/policeman/
• sinemetu11 12y ago
  I use a modified hosts file instead which is much better. See http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ Remember the web is pull not push.
  • jacquesm 12y ago
    Hosts files only work when the ads and other trash are not served from the same domain, and of course the bigger operators do everything they can to make you lose some critical functionality if you block their ad serving IPs. So you'll need to go to the URL level at a minimum if you don't want to use some important functionality.
    • psykovsky 12y ago
      I never lost functionality on a site because of hosts file blocking of ads. And that is together with NoScript
    • Nanzikambe 12y ago
      Actually this very rarely happens. I a DNS server on my router which has zone that routes all ad hosting & other wanted stuff to an IP which is then rejected by the firewall. I also have a transparent proxy rewriting all web pages removing IFRAMEs - this does ocassionally break things, but it's extremely rare to find a site that actually has a use for them other than serving ads.
      • verisimilitude 12y ago
        Both the DNS and the transparent proxy sound like an interesting way to improve the web at home (I'm thinking specifically of an iPhone on my WiFi) -- do you have more information about how you did these things?
        • Nanzikambe 12y ago
          I use a chrooted instance of Bind as it's a LAN only dns server, /etc/bind/named.conf includes: include "/etc/bind/adblock.conf"; That file is generated by a script that uses a hosts file maintained on http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ the script is something like: #!/bin/bash cat /etc/bind/adblock.conf | xz -z - > /etc/bind/adblock.conf-$(date "+%Y%m%d-%H%M%S").xz echo "" > /etc/bind/adblock.conf curl -o - http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ | sed -rn 's:^127\.0\.0\.1 ([^ #\t]+).*$:\1:p' > /tmp/addrs.txt cat /tmp/addrs.txt | while read line; do ! egrep -i $line /etc/bind/whitelist.txt >/dev/null \ && echo 'zone "'${line}'" IN { type master;notify no; file "/etc/bind/pri/adblock.zone";};' >> /etc/bind/adblock.conf done which can be called from cron or similar (if you do you need to reload/SIGHUP bind to reload its condiguration) you can whitelist stuff by adding a FQDN to /etc/bind/whitelist.txt The file /etc/bind/pri/adblock.zone contains something like: @ 1 IN SOA localhost. root.localhost. (1000 7200 120 1209600 3600) @ 259200 IN NS localhost. * 259200 IN A X.X.X.X @ 2 IN A X.X.X.X where X.X.X.X is an IP on different (but private and not internet routable) subnet, and iptables rules something like: iptables -N DNSBLACKHOLE iptables -A DNSBLACKHOLE -j LOG --log-prefix "DNSBLACKHOLE ::" iptables -A DNSBLACKHOLE -j REJECT iptables -A OUTPUT -p all -d X.X.X.X -j DNSBLACKHOLE iptables -A FORWARD -p all -d X.X.X.X -j DNSBLACKHOLE Transparent proxying is accomplished by iptables rules redirecting port 80 and 443 through SQUID which essentially performs a MITM, you can find out how to do this here: http://blog.davidvassallo.me/2011/03/22/squid-transparent-ssl-interception/ http://blog.davidvassallo.me/2011/03/22/squid-transparent-ss... Edit: it's also worth mentioning I transparently redirect all DNS traffic the router sees to my own bind instance, so untrusted devices are unable to use an alternative dns server.
• currysausage 12y ago
  My current favorite solution for blocking the more annoying ads and increasing security while preserving a low-latency browsing experience: Click-to-play for Flash Player (and all the other plug-ins). There are lots of gray boxes now all over the web, but I prefer them over resource-hungry attention-grabbing Flash ads.
  • delecti 12y ago
    It's amazing how well this improves the experience of using the internet with such a small change. Rarely there are sites that hide their flash elements if they aren't loaded properly, which can make it difficult to click them, but then you just whitelist the website if it's really important.
  • datasage 12y ago
    I switched to this as well. I was running into problems with pages refreshing flash video ads causing memory to leak quite badly if a page was open too long. Once i switched flash to click to play, the problem went away.
• anon4 12y ago
  I see nobody has posted it, so here is a very lightweight alternative - it redirects all known ad-hosting sites to 127.0.0.1 http://someonewhocares.org/hosts http://someonewhocares.org/hosts
  • narfz 12y ago
    i use the same approach. (https://twitter.com/beanieboi/status/546398095182163968 https://twitter.com/beanieboi/status/546398095182163968) it's not as elegant as hiding the HTML elements, you see some question marks on the page if safari couldn't load the resource. but overall i'm pretty pleased and it gets the job done.
  • zeitg3ist 12y ago
    Isn't it better to use something invalid (like 0.0.0.0) instead of 127.0.0.1? If you have a development server on your machine, rerouting ads to 127.0.0.1 means lots of useless requests...
    • jmiwhite 12y ago
      The author briefly discusses this and has made a 0.0.0.0 version available here: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero/ http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero/
  • qwerta 12y ago
    It also works on android phones
    • _asummers 12y ago
      Don't you need to be rooted to modify your hosts file on Android?
      • psykovsky 12y ago
        Yes, you need root.
  • 12y ago
• st3fan 12y ago
  You can remove the 'probably'. It is pretty well known that Adblock is a mayor memory hog.
• userbinator 12y ago
  The Proxomitron (local filtering proxy) + HOSTS file + Javascript whitelisting is all I need. Turning off JS instantly removes a ton of annoyances, effectively removes a huge attack area for browser exploits (I've accidentally infected others by sending them links to sites that had no effect on me...), and while there are certainly sites that require it (often not even of the "application" type, but just to do something that could've been done without), the majority of the ones I come across in e.g. searching for info don't need it. If a site I find when searching refuses to show anything, then I'll just go back and continue with the next search result or use Google's text-only cache which often does have the content I'm looking for in a more readable format. The whitelist is reserved for sites that are both highly trusted and absolutely necessary to enable JS on.
• Pxtl 12y ago
  I find its a hog and I don't run those.
• sly010 12y ago
  Isn't there a way for adblock+ to insert just the right set of css rules based on the page it is inserted to? It's not like every site displays ads from every possible ad network. I don't know the internals of AB+ so correct me if this is impossible for some reason.
• tek-cyb-org 12y ago
  32gb says not.
• Walkman 12y ago
  There was a very good discussion [1] about this 8 months ago when I realized the same [2]. I suggest try HTTP Switchboard instead (see the previous thread). [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7765758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7765758 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7765904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7765904
  • gorhill 12y ago
    I am not maintaining HTTPSB anymore. I refactored HTTPSB into uBlock/uMatrix. Many cringing usability issues[1] have been fixed with uMatrix, which is different enough from HTTPSB that I could not publish it as a newer version of HTTPSB. [1] https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/wiki/Changes-from-HTTP-Switchboard https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/wiki/Changes-from-HTTP-Sw...
    • Walkman 12y ago
      Thanks! I did not know about this, I will definitely use them.
• RRRA 12y ago
  Some ad blocking should definitely be built in for performance reason then ...
• alopecoid 12y ago
  A bit off topic, but could someone explain to me why it's so difficult for a browser (or extension) to effectively block 100% of all pop-ups/pop-unders? I realize that these account for only a fraction of ads, but they are really annoying and it seems that these should be the easiest to detect; doesn't this essentially boil down to a few specific API calls? For the few cases that a pop-up/pop-under is legitimate (really, are there any?), I'd be fine whitelisting these on a case-by-case basis.
  • cozuya 12y ago
    Effectively you're asking for all document.createElement calls to be blocked. Those are used for all sorts of things that aren't ads or popups. Blocking that would probably cause a very large percent of pages to be completely broken.
    • alopecoid 12y ago
      So there's no explicit way to distinguish between "new window" calls from other types of calls? I'm kind of shocked that, with all the effort that's been put into browsers in recent years, that the ability to "create a new window" hasn't been removed entirely from the API without explicit user consent. Again, I can't think of a single site that uses this feature legitimately.
      • cozuya 12y ago
        If you're talking about actual new windows that are a separate process, those have been blocked by popup blockers for years. As far as popovers that block the screen/annoy you, those are just HTML elements that are positioned on top of normal content - its not a "special" thing backed into the DOM API. There's really no effective way to stop a page from being able to do that unless you disable javascript entirely.
        • nitrogen 12y ago
          There have been tricks that get popups through, possibly by exploiting browser bugs or opening the popup in one of the few on* handlers where browsers allow them.
• pwr22 12y ago
  This is already shown to be the case with FF, ABP uses a lot of memory per tab
• iamgopal 12y ago
  First two article on Hn are very fast DNS server and this one. I can sense startup or at least weekend hacking idea...
• ddingus 12y ago
  I have been running Firefox without any blocker for a long time. Didn't mind the ADS, and I thought it an easy way to fund various things. No worries, until those video and audio ads got out of control. Some pages would bury my machine! And it's a good machine too. 2012 Mac Book Pro. The memory profile of Firefox itself is kind of a pig, but not something I would worry too much about. Firefox with those ads? Out of control. Firefox with simple Adblock is back to no worries again. I'll have to give uBlock a try.
• ins0 12y ago
  yeah iframes on every modern webpage... a problem is the adblock injection and it cost of curse. but please don't blame iframes for this...no one use iframes anymore accept for ads
  • icelancer 12y ago
    Er, Google? Payment providers who need a secure frame?
  • nandhp 12y ago
    Most videos are embedded using iframes.
• TeMPOraL 12y ago
  > In Nethercote’s testing, he found that TechCrunch used around 194MB of RAM without ABP enabled 194MB for a single webpage that should mainly be text communicating a message. Does anyone else than me find this crazy?
  • cheald 12y ago
    Ads mean iframes, which mean tons of separate DOMs, which are heavy and expensive. You also have to consider that images are decompressed for display; that 474x350 image in the lead spot on the Techcrunch homepage is 474 * 359 * 4 = 663,600 bytes in RAM, plus any overhead. When you consider how image-heavy sites have become, that's a lot of memory that can disappear in a hurry.
  • tomjen3 12y ago
    Not if it has rendered the text out so that scrolling is super smooth, in addition to the javascript, css and html parsing and optimization overhead. Don't forget the pictures too.
  • nnethercote 12y ago
    > a single webpage that should mainly be text communicating a message That was more or less true of the web in, say, 1995. Today, a web browser is an advanced programming environment with broad multimedia capabilities (including audio, video, and 2D and 3D graphics) that also happens to have some excellent document presentation features relating to text and images. (Edit: I previously said this much better here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743284) You may think this is a bad thing, and that's a reasonable opinion to have. But if you think it's not true you'll only mislead yourself.
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    • clarry 12y ago
      > Today, a web browser is an advanced programming environment with broad multimedia capabilities It doesn't matter what the tool is to you. When we're visiting something like techcrunch, we're there for the text and then maybe a few pictures.
• paulhauggis 12y ago
  So, with all the people here doing Adblock. Should I feel bad when startups go bust because of the lack of advertising dollars?
  • frozenport 12y ago
    No because web advertizements are not cost effective for selling products and while being a poor source of money. Noted in http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/farewell-dr-dobbs/240169421 http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/farewell-dr-d... >> They've come to realize that website ads tend to be less effective than they once were. Given that I've never bought a single item by clicking on an ad on a website, this conclusion seems correct in the small
    • stevesearer 12y ago
      Web advertisements work great for advertisers familiar with buying advertising space in magazines where the goal isn't about generating an immediate purchase. On my website, office furniture manufacturers use the advertising space to display their new products to our readers - the majority of whom design office environments for a living and purchase 0% of the products they use in their projects on the internet.
• matkam 12y ago
  Honorable mention, privoxy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743261
• frik 12y ago
  It's a chicken egg problem. 1) Website owners use ads to earn money (server and employee costs, revenue). 2) Several Ad networks create ads that influence and annoy users and track their browser habits. e.g. blinking buggy video ads with sound that sometimes even crash the flash plugin 3) Visitors install Adblock+ because they dislike intrusive ads that don't adhere to the browser privacy settings. Some websites are unusable without an ad-blocker. Many websites even crash the mobile browser. 4) Companies buy ads cheaper as ads are clicked in reality by clicking-bots and are worth less than years ago. 4) Website owner places more ads because the earn less for the same amount of served ads as last year and because more and more block all ads altogether. 5) Even more visitors install adblockers and turn them on for all websites. 6) Website owners introduce a paywall so that parts of their content or everything is behind closed doors for paying customers only. 7) The visitors switch to alternative website that offer comparable content for free, monetized by ads or maintained as hobby. 8) and so on... Paywalls are not the solution. Another website will appear that offers comparable content for free. Example: The Microsoft Network (MSN 1) that was meant to replace the WWW in 1995 and shipped with Win95. Bill Gates had to rewrite his vision of the information highway, micro payments and Microsoft Network in his famous book "The Road Ahead", half a year later as MSN failed and WWW succeeded he released a second book edition that removed all references and now acknowledges the WWW. Pictures of MSN 1: http://winsupersite.com/windows-live/msn-inside-story http://winsupersite.com/windows-live/msn-inside-story Everyone has to change a bit, to improve the current status: * The ad-networks that still code flash-based ads should move to HTML5. * The companies that buy ad-space from such ad-networks should care more about the ad-quality. * The website owners should care more about which ad-network they select. * The visitors should use less adblock-plugins. * The WHATWG/W3C/browser developer should improve some situations with HTML 5.x so that there is no single reason for flash based ads.
  • cerrelio 12y ago
    More of a vicious cycle. The ad networks bare most of the blame because they face a moral hazard. They can either deny annoying ads and lose revenue, or accept them and push the risk of adverse events to the publisher. The publisher will respond as you describe above. Ultimately the publisher fizzles out and their ad network drops them for non-performance. Most ad networks appear to be willing to accept trashy ads in lieu of instituting quality controls. This is my experience in working at a publishing network that did not have its own ad server.
• dpweb 12y ago
  This in your JS should hide site content from adblock users (adsense only): window.hasOwnProperty('google_ad_block') || (document.body.innerHTML = 'Please disable adblock to use this page')
• philip1209 12y ago
  If we can curate a list of ad domains, then adding them to the hosts file and null-routing the DNS would both remove ads and be super quick
  • aendruk 12y ago
    Like this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8802746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8802746
• cm3 12y ago
  For blocking hosts you can also use https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/Adsuck https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/Adsuck
• Animats 12y ago
  Maybe I should write one. I wrote AdLimiter, (adlimiter.com) which eliminates certain ads from Google search result pages. It's really a demo for our site rating service, SiteTruth,but it has the internal machinery to find and remove ads. The basic idea is that it finds links to sites in the DOM, and works outward in the DOM to find the ad boundary. Then, if analysis of the link indicates the ad should be deleted, the offending section is deleted from the DOM. It takes one linear pass through the DOM to find ads. If the page changes, five seconds after the changes quiet down, another pass is made. This approach is reasonably general and requires little maintenance. I once looked at AdBlock's code. Internally, AdBlock makes heavy use of regular expressions and does a lot of searching. It seems to be doing more work per page than should be necessary. In some ways, Ghostery is more useful than AdBlock. It blocks most trackers, which reduces network I/O. Some ads disappear once their tracker is disabled. (CBS TV shows play without commercials if Ghostery is running.) I've been toying with the idea of an ad blocker that uses simple machine learning. All content coming from off-site links gets a light grey overlay. If you click on the grey overlay, it disappears so you can view the content, and the off-site link is rated as less spammy. If you ignore the overlay, the off-site link is viewed as more spammy. The grey overlays gradually get more opaque over areas where you never remove them, and when they go fully opaque, the covered content is deleted completely.
  • hurin 12y ago
    Loading all content and placing overlays are precisely the reasons Addblock plus hogs so much RAM, as opposed to simply not loading the content.
    • gorhill 12y ago
      There are two kind of filters: cosmetic ("element hiding") and network filters. Network filters = to prevent the fetching of remote resources. Cosmetic filters = to prevent portion of the DOM to be visible. Adblock won't load any content when filtered through network filters, the requests to the remote server won't even be made. The problem the article refers to is related to how cosmetic filters are implemented in Adblock. And that problem has nothing to do with "placing overlays", whatever that means.
• hurin 12y ago
  Firefox gets slower with every update - and it's certainly not Addblock plus that's at fault (although yes, addblock plus has a very inefficient implementation.) If you use Chromium I recommend HTTPSwitchboard.
  • mrinterweb 12y ago
    "Firefox gets slower with every update", I don't believe this is still the case. There have been significant performance improvements in recent versions of Firefox. If you haven't tried Firefox in a while, I'd recommend giving it another shot. By what I've seen lately, Firefox might be edging Chrome out in performance.
    • hurin 12y ago
      I still use Firefox for anything where I need to be logged in since I'm rather uncomfortable about using Google services combined with a Google browser - but it's definitely a significant performance downgrade.
      • scholia 12y ago
        Don't agree. My perception is that Firefox is faster now than it was two years ago, and today it's generally as fast as or faster than Chrome. BTW, I'm another that won't log into Google services with a Google-owned browser: I usually use IE11 for that. But I use Firefox for Microsoft services ...
• ddebernardy 12y ago
  > On a modern website, there can be dozens of iframes. Let me fix that for you: > On a shit website, there can be dozens of iframes.
• Yizahi 12y ago
  Behold the power of the Time Machine - the text straight from the 90th-00th. Everyone was like "Oh, this new Windoze uses 500 megs when idle! Then 1000 megs! Then 2000 megs! etc. etc.". Come on people, we are buying our hardware precisely for this - to be used. Now this ET site with 28 spyware modules from random advertisers is telling me - "Don't use your CPU it will make it slower, also don't use too much RAM. Instead make your brain slower and use more brain memory for useless stuff. Because you know - think about children, and because we are entitled for our business model by birth right.".
  • sliverstorm 12y ago
    RAM is a bit of a slippery slope. Yes, if you've got it you should use it. It is there to be used. But we don't have enough of it yet to just shovel it out the window as fast as we can. Additionally it impacts performance (RAM access is not free) and limits compatibility with older devices.
  • gorhill 12y ago
    > we are buying our hardware precisely for this - to be used I have a counterargument page dedicated to apologists of inefficient software: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Who-cares-about-efficiency,-I-have-8-GB-and%7Cor-a-quad-core-CPU https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Who-cares-about-effic...
    • LnxPrgr3 12y ago
      Thank you! A typical workload for me includes a mail client, a spreadsheet tracking time, a horde of browser tabs relevant to something I'm working on, possibly one or more virtual machines, hordes of MacVim tabs and terminal windows, intermittent C++ compiles and neural network training runs, sometimes Eclipse, etc. My browser isn't the only thing running. As machines get faster, I expect them to handle more work, not for software to expand to take up all available resources. I can understand e.g. using otherwise unused RAM for aggressive caching to reduce latency—I did buy RAM to use it. I can't understand wasting both RAM and CPU just because we have more these days. I'm not talking crazy micro-optimization—just not being completely blind to runtime costs.
• ben0x539 12y ago
  Sounds like if Mozilla wants to improve Firefox memory usage, they should work on blocking ads natively so people don't need Adblock Plus. <:D
  • nnethercote 12y ago
    You're going to love Tracking Protection: http://monica-at-mozilla.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/tracking-protection-in-firefox.html http://monica-at-mozilla.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/tracking-pr... It's an in-development feature to block parts of websites that track you. In practice, it mostly blocks ads, and it blocks most ads. And it doesn't have the performance/memory hit of AdBlock Plus for two reasons: * The domain matching is simpler (no regexps) and thus much faster. * It doesn't use CSS to fix up the layout of pages that have had ads removed; it just leaves blank white rectangles. (AdBlock Plus has lots of complex and even site-specific CSS code to do this.) (I've been told this by one of the Tracking Protection developers, though I may have got the details slightly wrong.) In testing done by its developers, it speeds up the load time of the median page by 20%! So overall it gives more privacy, less page clutter, and faster browsing. Fantastic stuff.
    • tracker1 12y ago
      What's funny is when you take the time to ensure than your layout will reflow nicely with ad blockers.. actually having the empty spaces is a bit worse imho. Wondering about catching on-error events for iframes.. or load errors, etc... that may help in detection, and reflow. I'm more concerned about things continuing to look nice with adblockers than circumventing them.
• therzathegza 12y ago
  Increases the SNR of the internet so high, it's actually worth it. I'd rather spend more on memory and have a less annoying internet :). Consider the technical solution alternatives, and getting people to use them. Now look at how easy it is to install ABP.
• _greim_ 12y ago
  I don't mind ads most of the time. I have a script that rips out iframes, flash and other junk, and does a few other "cleansing" operations. It works fairly well and it's satisfying to push the "zap" button when a certain page is getting particularly annoying, and see all those rectangles become suddenly blank.
• icantthinkofone 12y ago
  To be clear, Adblock Plus is a memory hog that causes issues for Firefox and Chrome users. The added memory is not a problem of either browser and they do not cause that themselves.
• seoguru 12y ago
  handy trick: install "incognito this tab" https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/incognito-this-tab/nhockicmnnjibbhgcpphjicilgcfehdi?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/incognito-this-tab... if adblocker is interfering with page, right mouse click and bring up tab in incognito mode (which doesn't load extensions unless specified).
  • tokenizerrr 12y ago
    Or you just whitelist the site through the adblock menu and enable adblock for incognito as well. Most sites I tend to visit through incognito are somewhat ad-heavy, and I'd rather still block them there.
• htilonom 12y ago
  Why does the topic say Firefox when µBlock isn't even for Firefox? Chrome is the problem, not Firefox. All browsers became huge memory hogs lately, but I'd rather have 100MB+ of RAM just for Adblock than blinded by ads (of which a lot are malicious).
• ChrisGranger 12y ago
  My computer is a Windows Vista-era relic with 2 GB of RAM and I rarely have any trouble browsing unless I've got loads of tabs open (which would undoubtedly gobble all of my memory regardless). I'm using RequestPolicyContinued. Using a whitelist for third-party requests seems to do a lot of the heavy lifting so that my Adblock Plus filters are limited to a handful of specific things I don't want to see.
• joeyyang 12y ago
  I was recently having a ton of memory issues with Chrome without Adblock installed -- turns out a lot of Chrome extensions are memory hogs. A quick `ps aux` will let you see what extensions are the worst offenders; clearing out a bunch of unused extensions helped restore my computer back to normal.
• panzi 12y ago
  > click-to-play add-ons like Flashblock You don't need an add-on for that. Firefox and Chrome both have this as an optional built-in feature. I think it should be on by default (which it sadly isn't).
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• SwellJoe 12y ago
  I use AdBlock Plus not because I don't want to see ads...I actually don't mind ads. I use it because I don't want auto-starting audio, ever. I have 30-60 tabs up at any given time. When an ad starts playing audio, it disrupts my entire workflow, possibly disturbs my partner sleeping next to me, etc. In short, auto-start audio in ads is quite simply so far outside of what I consider acceptable behavior, that I'm willing to burn the whole goddamned business model to the ground to stop it. I disable AdBlock Plus for sites that I know to behave responsibly with regard to their ads (reddit, probably a couple of others). If there were a list of Advertising Good Citizens who never use auto-starting audio ads (such a list would probably need to demand a few other things, like a good privacy policy, no popups/popunders, etc., but audio is the single reason I installed AdBlock Plus), that could be dropped into AdBlock Plus, I would happily use it. I don't mind ads, but the second somebody disrupts my work, my conversation on Skype, my partner's sleep, my music listening, etc. is the second I grow to hate the site and the advertiser.
  • brandon272 12y ago
    This is why I usually have my audio muted.
    • keevie 12y ago
      this seems like a much easier (and more foolproof) solution....
    • klibertp 12y ago
      This works very well outside of a browser, too. For example various beeps from Window Manager or terminal emulator or particular programs can be very irritating and disabling them all means going through endless pile of different "settings" dialogs. It breaks down, however, when you want to listen to some music while working. In the end I have my audio muted most of the time, but over time I had to go through all those settings anyway.
  • dbbolton 12y ago
    Couldn't you bind most of the offending domains to 0.0.0.0 in your hosts files and skip the browser extension?
• sumitviii 12y ago
  http://i.imgur.com/UPW4iFD.jpg http://i.imgur.com/UPW4iFD.jpg Now that's real irony.
• sandsand 12y ago
  I seems an overstatement to me. I would say it's misuse of iframes and only then adblock.
• kolev 12y ago
  They are memory hogs with or without particular extensions. I leave Chrome with 10 basic tabs open and in 4 hours, it's already "using" 2GB of RAM. The new Firefox Developer Edition with "process per tab" is similar. The best resource-friendly browser on OS X is Safari.
  • brymaster 12y ago
    > The best resource-friendly browser on OS X is Safari. You may find others having an opposite experience: http://i.imgur.com/qfwwXhw.png http://i.imgur.com/qfwwXhw.png :)
    • mitchty 12y ago
      I can beat that a skosh. Here is adblock safari (granted this was with adblock on and safari running a while). http://imgur.com/J1rP6V0 http://imgur.com/J1rP6V0 Safari+adblock+ any amount of tabs+history = I want 64g of ram on my laptop stat.
• mavsman 12y ago
  Totally worth any memory issues it causes. I jumped on Safari the other day without it and it was awful.
• XorNot 12y ago
  This doesn't explain how Chrome, on a PC which is just serving a simple billboard page with some dynamic Jquery to update it, ends up using 4gb of RAM after a few hours despite no Javascript memory leaks.
• znowi 12y ago
  tl;dr "Please do not use ad blockers" – Ad industry
• dreadfulgoat 12y ago
  I just realized that getting something like AdBlock as a transparent default in major browsers is something that could actually kill Google as we know it. A lot hinges on modern auto-update pipelines.
• linuxhansl 12y ago
  I just maintain my own small custom list, all automatic lists are disabled. Ads are OK unless they are animated, IMHO. Flash is totally out of course. In fact I think I am doing these advertisers a favor since I do keep a mental list of who not to buy from, that list includes folks who have animated and flash ads (and those who advertise on Fox News, but that is a different story). So I usually just block ads that are really obnoxious. Every few months I review the list and remove any entry that was filtered less than 10 times or so. That has two advantages. First I get to control what is filtered, and second it prevents that list from growing so much.
• wyclif 12y ago
  Here's what I do for Firefox and AdBlock Plus: Under "Filter Preferences", uncheck everything marked EasyList. Under "Custom Filters" add EasyList without element hiding rules and make sure it's checked. Restart. This speeds things up considerably. On Chromium I don't use AdBlock Plus, it's too much of a memory hog. Instead, I use the much leaner and faster µBlock for dynamic filtering: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/ https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/
• getdavidhiggins 12y ago
  Related http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ HN Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6002544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6002544 Make sure localhost / 127.0.0.1 resolves to something though. A blank `index.html` in the root is lightweight enough. For the perfnerds, you can resolve it using lighthttpd
• brazzledazzle 12y ago
  There's a couple inaccurate things in that article that stood out at me. It should be pretty easy to measure the CPU hit when running ABP. It looks like the author is running windows so he should be able to use perfmon. He also mentions that "As with all proxy servers, though, the one caveat is that it doesn’t work with HTTPS connections" which is very much wrong.
  • oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
    Also, the article's claim that most pages on the web make use of several iframes is laughable conjecture. Using their own site's poorly put-together home page as an example does not prove their point. And claiming that all free content on the web only exists because of advertising is disingenuous, to say the least.
    • tracker1 12y ago
      True enough.. most iframes these days are ads.. which ABP blocks.. and the majority of the rest seem to be social widgets which are nearly as bad... I hate them all myself.. though I get why they may be wanted.
  • kasabali 12y ago
    Here is the real deal if you didn't like the blogspam: https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-pluss-effect-on-firefoxs-memory-usage/ https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-plus...
• mattmurdog 12y ago
  Why would this even matter with the type of machines we have today? I'm sure your 8gigs can handle a little Ad Block.
• shmerl 12y ago
  Didn't ABP+ developers plan to address this? How is that effort going? UPDATE: Here is the bug to track: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=988266 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=988266
• jordanpg 12y ago
  Has anyone seen analysis that covers Adblock in addition to Adblock Plus? Do the same findings still obtain?
• gcb0 12y ago
  if you want to get rid of intrusive ads and tracking, you should use hosts file from someonewhocares.org because ad block won't work on mobiles, and devices owned more by Google/apple than yourself. if you want to block malicious scripts and plugins you should use noscript. both will actually improve memory use and performance, not to mention getting closer to solving the problem in the first place
• pmontra 12y ago
  It's unfortunate and maybe it can be engineered in a better way but still I'm happy to trade CPU and RAM for uncluttered web pages. Whenever I watch somebody navigate without AdBlock, I always wonder how they could get used to make sense of all that mixed mess of ads and content. Furthermore if sites are paid per click my pre AdBlock contribute to all the ads sustained web sites was probably way less than $1. They are losing little by my use of AdBlock. One reason I didn't click ads was precisely that they are so intrusive and ugly. Thanks to AdBlock I'm spared with that and they don't lose bandwidth and CPU to serve ads that won't be clicked. Win-win.
• avinassh 12y ago
  I use my Raspberry Pi as ad blocking proxy and I don't have to worry about performance usage on my machine at all! Some routers allow have this option built in and also you can block IPs of common ad publishers. [0] - https://learn.adafruit.com/raspberry-pi-as-an-ad-blocking-access-point?view=all# https://learn.adafruit.com/raspberry-pi-as-an-ad-blocking-ac...
• jervisfm 12y ago
  I realized that Adblock plus was a performance hog a long time ago and it is good to see that information being shared widely. The issue especially impacts those who have many many tabs open all at once. Interestingly, there is a uBlock alternative which I had not heard about[1]. If the more efficient claims are true, it would definitely be worthwhile to switch over to that instead. [1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/%C2%B5Block-vs.-ABP:-efficiency-compared https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/%C2%B5Block-vs.-ABP:-...
• thibauts 12y ago
  I made a host filtering proxy with node a while ago to solve exactly this problem. https://github.com/thibauts/node-host-filtering-proxy https://github.com/thibauts/node-host-filtering-proxy Edge cases are not completely ironed out but if people want to help perfect it I'll very happily accept PRs !