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Mozilla fixed a 14-year-old bug in Firefox, Adblock Plus uses less memory

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Re: Mozilla fixed a 14-year-old bug in Firefox, Adblock Plus uses less memory

#101

Post by gurkendoktor »

look_lookatme wrote: post #90
CoffeeOnWrite wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: is it really that difficult to make your site not broken by ad blockers? (Your response worries me in that it is an exceptionally convenient argument for sloppy developers not to fix their sites)

You expect people to go out of their way to support ad blockers???

Depends on what their business is. Apple's $99-a-year developer portal recently broke because I block Adobe's Omniture tracking. The same happened to me on an ad-free, crowdfunded news site that I've backed. In these cases, "does not work with ABP/ublock/Ghostery" is a valid bug report.

Re: Mozilla fixed a 14-year-old bug in Firefox, Adblock Plus uses less memory

#102

Post by tdkl »

anc84 wrote: post #95
tdkl wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any info on Adblock Fast[1] ? They advertise as being lightweight with only 7 rules and I wonder how they compare to uBlock Origin (I'd still choose Origin because of the customization options). [1] http://adblockfast.com/ And thank you for making browsing the Internet awesome.

It's snake oil. The 7 rules are 7 lines of many many rules. Stay clear of anyone making such misleading marketing claims!

Well yes, I'm aware it's highly suspicious, just didn't want any name calling. Just wanted to see the authors opinion about it and if he ever tested it out, or will in the future, specially if they claim such bold enhancements regarding ABP. If anyone can comment on this topic, it's gorhill.

Re: Mozilla fixed a 14-year-old bug in Firefox, Adblock Plus uses less memory

#103

Post by pidg »

kijin wrote: post #52
nnethercote wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Here's a comment that I made on this topic on my blog back when this was discussed in July, which is still relevant. The numbers have probably changed a bit, but I doubt enough to affect my point. (The link is https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2015/07/01/firefox-41-w... ).] I’ve seen variations on this comment many times in discussions of this post. It’s totally wrong-headed. Here are the usage stats for these ad…

Adblock Edge also still has 0.71 million daily users despite the fact that it is no longer maintained. (The maintainers recommend uBlock Origin instead.) That's more than all of the uBlock add-ons combined. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/...

As a long-time Adblock Edge user, thanks. It's a shame they don't have a mechanism to alert users about that.

Re: Mozilla fixed a 14-year-old bug in Firefox, Adblock Plus uses less memory

#104

Post by digi_owl »

nnethercote wrote: post #65
karlshea wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to Chrome about 6 months before MemShrink, right around the time everyone from Mozilla kept blaming addons for memory problems and saying there wasn't a problem with Firefox. When the MemShrink project was announced I just laughed. I've got it installed for development and I have no complaints, but now that I've got Chrome set up for syncing and all that it's just become my default. I'm sure I'll get annoy…

Add-ons were certainly a big part of it. Firefox 15 fixed most of the add-on problems, see here: https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/07/19/firefox-15-p... But there were plenty of other problems fixed too. See https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/category/memshrink/ for lots of details. With that in mind, in the future perhaps you could think twice before posting snarky comments based on your experiences from f…

Never mind that if you want to find out what is hogging the ram, there is about:memory.

Re: Mozilla fixed a 14-year-old bug in Firefox, Adblock Plus uses less memory

#105

Post by gorhill »

nitrogen wrote: post #77
gorhill wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One doesn't even need to turn off uBlock if one disagrees with the wholesome blocking of sourceforge.net: right in the warning page, uBlock Origin offers the user to remove temporarily or permanently the wholesome blocking for the site.

An OT grammar note: if the sentence doesn't seem clear at first, it's possible "wholesome" should be "wholesale". I think.

Oops, right, I meant "wholesale".

Re: Mozilla fixed a 14-year-old bug in Firefox, Adblock Plus uses less memory

#106

Post by pbhjpbhj »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #55
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #5

Great for everyone still using Adblock Plus. The rest of us switched to uBlock Origin and never looked back.

I use alternate host files.

I used to do that but found it ultimately too fiddly - like if you need to unblock a site manually editing your etc/hosts, then you have to get your browser to refresh it's DNS cache.

Do you use an app to manage your hosts file?

Re: Mozilla fixed a 14-year-old bug in Firefox, Adblock Plus uses less memory

#107

Post by myfonj »

CoffeeOnWrite wrote: post #63
gorhill wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> EasyList is maintained by ABP's parent company EasyList/EasyPrivacy are community-driven filter lists.[1] Whatever whitelisting in EasyList/EasyPrivacy is to address site breakage. Not addressing site breakage would lead to less people using these lists, and thus less people benefiting from the protection they offer (see graph at link below). The "acceptable ads" fitlers are in a separate list, which is not part of…

Honest question: is it really that difficult to make your site not broken by ad blockers? (Your response worries me in that it is an exceptionally convenient argument for sloppy developers not to fix their sites)

There are situations when it is difficult or at leas annoying: sometimes blocking rules are too loose that generates false positives. Few examples from my personal memory:

- "Block any image on any domain that has `/ad/` in its path." (Encountered in certain local block list, not present in such pure form at time of writing.) Found this one while inspecting bugreport of our client who complained he cannot see some images on his presentation we maintained. Our CMS serves static binary data with "folderized hash paths" where occurrence of `/ad/` is not completely avoidable. Even now Easylist [1] inludes many general `adsomething` rules that FMOPW could do many false positives.

- "Block any flash that has `clickthru` parameter." This rule is still present in aforementioned easylist [1]: `.swf?clickthru=`, but amusingly is very easily avoidable (rule insists that this parameter is first). Back in times this parameter was de facto standard for embedded flash serving as hyperlink to tell it where to link to. Found this one when another client complained that his flash-based part of main navigation (supplied by third party studio) does not work.

- Even now the question "Have you disabled your adblocker?" often relevant response to general WTFs during web-development.

[1] https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt

Re: Mozilla fixed a 14-year-old bug in Firefox, Adblock Plus uses less memory

#108

Post by gorhill »

tdkl wrote: post #102
anc84 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's snake oil. The 7 rules are 7 lines of many many rules. Stay clear of anyone making such misleading marketing claims!

Well yes, I'm aware it's highly suspicious, just didn't want any name calling. Just wanted to see the authors opinion about it and if he ever tested it out, or will in the future, specially if they claim such bold enhancements regarding ABP. If anyone can comment on this topic, it's gorhill.

Adblock Fast is like BluHell -- last time I looked into it, the seven huge regexes were a direct import from BluHell. I ran a mini-benchmark for which I reported the results here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10198994

uBlock Origin itself has higher memory footprint, but given that it blocks more (using default settings), on average it will cause web pages to consume less memory, so eventually with many tab opened, uBlock Origin may end up being more efficient than Adblock Fast memory-wise.

Re: Mozilla fixed a 14-year-old bug in Firefox, Adblock Plus uses less memory

#109

Post by reitanqild »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #97
Steltek wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been that way in Firefox for as long as I can remember (user since Firefox started). I believe the actual intent is that the right click menu is a "context" menu and not a shortcut menu. In this, case, the context is that you have text highlighted. Without a selection, the context is the page.

Agreed, It seems to work the same way in Chrome as well. I'm not sure what the problem is?

  It seems to work the same way in Chrome as well. I'm not sure what the problem is?
The problem is for some of us (fast typist/clickers) it breaks consistency.

Suddenly, out of the blue, for no good reason, the user interface changes and my plan of action fails. No big deal but it is part of death by thousand papercuts.

The reason is so non-intuitive that people has made it all the way to reporting it on bugzilla[0] without clear steps to reproduce..! .

A second unrelated problem with your argument: "... It seems to work the same way in Chrome as well". For some of us FF/FF-flone users that is not a very convincing argument. : )

[0]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1144394

Re: Mozilla fixed a 14-year-old bug in Firefox, Adblock Plus uses less memory

#110

Post by JustSomeNobody »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #106
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use alternate host files.

I used to do that but found it ultimately too fiddly - like if you need to unblock a site manually editing your etc/hosts, then you have to get your browser to refresh it's DNS cache. Do you use an app to manage your hosts file?

I use GasMask on OS X. Makes switching through host files a breeze.

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/29949/gas-mask

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