5 ms·

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

by 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.
  - Houshalter 12y ago
    If I put them in a bookmark I'll likely never look at them again.
    - milkmiruku 12y ago
      I use a wiki instead these days. I like tags and social bookmarking, and a wiki is quick and easier to self host. https://wiki.thingsandstuff.org/Main_Page https://wiki.thingsandstuff.org/Main_Page Edit: also https://github.com/343max/TabHibernation https://github.com/343max/TabHibernation great to save resources when processing too many tabs. also, https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session-buddy/edacconmaakjimmfgnblocblbcdcpbko https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session-buddy/edac... for snapshots in case you do crash otherwise, Readability
  - barrkel 12y ago
    If you use both tree style tabs (which, apart from stacking tabs vertically, lets you collapse tab trees if you desire, and the trees are naturally topic-oriented) and tab groups (a built-in feature, good for splitting tabs by topic), you can easily have hundreds of tabs on the go. Tabs are sort of a halfway house to bookmarks for me. They persist across browser restarts, but the fact that they are still open increases the chances that I'll consume the information in them.
  - bigbugbag 12y ago
    bookmarks have been broken for quite a number of years now. UX is terrible and irrelevant to my workflow. I use two browsers with 100-150 tabs each and session management is lacking in web browsers. I use the sidebar and tab grouping to keep track. My solution was to add a 8GB stick of RAM with the usual disabling of javascript by default, no iframes allowed and no flash installed with adblock and fanboy's lists.
dannypgh 12y ago
"This provides an engineering anecdote that adblocking is worth more than half a gig to a large fraction of the population" That's a reasonable conclusion only if people are aware that they're making the trade, which I suspect most users are not (otherwise this article would be rather boring)
- justinhj 12y ago
  I would suspect that most people don't come close to using all the ram in their computer in normal use. Whether they use adblock or not will not have any noticeable affect on the computer performance apart from the blocking of ads.
  - dannypgh 12y ago
    Not sure I agree with this. I tend to use way too many tabs, and therefore use up my memory. I was visiting my parents recently, and on their Mac they were leaving a lot of programs running (having closed the window but not exiting the program). I think low-memory situations are the most likely explanation for slowdowns experienced by typical home or office users.

by VLM 12y ago

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.
- Houshalter 12y ago
  If I put them in a bookmark I'll likely never look at them again.
  - milkmiruku 12y ago
    I use a wiki instead these days. I like tags and social bookmarking, and a wiki is quick and easier to self host. https://wiki.thingsandstuff.org/Main_Page https://wiki.thingsandstuff.org/Main_Page Edit: also https://github.com/343max/TabHibernation https://github.com/343max/TabHibernation great to save resources when processing too many tabs. also, https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session-buddy/edacconmaakjimmfgnblocblbcdcpbko https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session-buddy/edac... for snapshots in case you do crash otherwise, Readability
- barrkel 12y ago
  If you use both tree style tabs (which, apart from stacking tabs vertically, lets you collapse tab trees if you desire, and the trees are naturally topic-oriented) and tab groups (a built-in feature, good for splitting tabs by topic), you can easily have hundreds of tabs on the go. Tabs are sort of a halfway house to bookmarks for me. They persist across browser restarts, but the fact that they are still open increases the chances that I'll consume the information in them.
- bigbugbag 12y ago
  bookmarks have been broken for quite a number of years now. UX is terrible and irrelevant to my workflow. I use two browsers with 100-150 tabs each and session management is lacking in web browsers. I use the sidebar and tab grouping to keep track. My solution was to add a 8GB stick of RAM with the usual disabling of javascript by default, no iframes allowed and no flash installed with adblock and fanboy's lists.

dannypgh 12y ago

"This provides an engineering anecdote that adblocking is worth more than half a gig to a large fraction of the population" That's a reasonable conclusion only if people are aware that they're making the trade, which I suspect most users are not (otherwise this article would be rather boring)

justinhj 12y ago
I would suspect that most people don't come close to using all the ram in their computer in normal use. Whether they use adblock or not will not have any noticeable affect on the computer performance apart from the blocking of ads.
- dannypgh 12y ago
  Not sure I agree with this. I tend to use way too many tabs, and therefore use up my memory. I was visiting my parents recently, and on their Mac they were leaving a lot of programs running (having closed the window but not exiting the program). I think low-memory situations are the most likely explanation for slowdowns experienced by typical home or office users.