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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

#111

Post by kijin »

pidg wrote: post #103
kijin wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adblock Edge also still has 0.71 million daily users despite the fact that it is no longer maintained.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.

In the past, it was not uncommon for me to update Firefox, try to figure out why an add-on stopped working, and only then realize that the add-on in question hadn't been maintained for more than a year.

If the maintainers of ABE really want their users to switch to uBlock, they could push a final update that displays a notice about its own deprecation. There's no need to rely on the app store to do that.

But they're not doing it, and I suppose it's because even without further updates, ABE will continue to work perfectly fine for the foreseeable future. In fact, according to the article, it will work even better than before.

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

#112

Post by yAnonymous »

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)

If the site has a proper layout and the ad blocker does its job, i.e. blocks only elements with ads, you won't have to do a thing.

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

#113

Post by yAnonymous »

nitrogen wrote: post #76
tempestn wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ad blockers don't just block third party things though. Or even necessarily sane things. Our site is a classified ad aggregator. At the time at least, we learned that Adblock Plus would just blithely delete any element with 'ad' as part of its class. (A major section of our results page had the class 'ad block' (ironically) and was blocked.) Yes, these things can be worked around, but not every site maintainer will b…

The most egregious site breakage from ad blockers is when sites can't handle the absence of their Adobe or Google JS. Some sites have large amounts of content that is only loaded via three levels of third-party-JS indirection. Others will try to fire an event to Google Analytics on every click, but if GA doesn't load, an error is thrown that prevents the click's default action. I was making a $1000-range purchase on…

>when sites can't handle the absence of their Adobe

When sites that require flash break, isn't that a win for the user?

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

#114

Post by unKlever »

ac29 wrote: post #57
unKlever wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any tips for performance. I use chrome and ublock, umatrix and disconnect. Disconnect is a few second penalty but worth it for a free proxy. However, I am not sure whether ublock runs before uMatrix, or how much that matters. I was hoping to find a few great regex heuristics to speed things up and procide better blocking. I personally don't use 3rd party block by default because honestly why bother, sites…

uBlock can use disconnect's filter lists, its in the options. I'm not sure why you think disconnect is giving you a "free proxy", that doesn't seem to be a feature.

It runs anonymous search and returns the results from their servers proxied. It offers an actual VPN if i am not mistaken, as a paid service.

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

#115

Post by bzbarsky »

josteink wrote: post #82
logn wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this comment should be a classic: Peter 2001-12-01 13:07:33 PST Will this really land by Dec 11?

Developers are an optimistic breed. Hard bug to fix :)

The author of comment 3 there was a manager, if I recall correctly. Which I may not. It's been a while.

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

#116

Post by bzbarsky »

zurn wrote: post #75

I don't see any percentage-wise memory savings in the article or here in comments. How big a difference does a couple of MB per document make?

Depends on the documents and how many there are.

On your typical 50-100MB web-appy page (e.g. gmail) a couple MB is a few percent.

On about:blank, which is normally a few hundred KB, a couple MB is several thousand percent.

So if a page has lots of subframes and those subframes don't have much in them, you get large wins. The canonical things that have lots of subframes are techcrunch and the like, which have "like" buttons for several different social networks and whatnot all over them. Each of those "like" buttons is a separate iframe. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=988266#c7 has some relevant numbers for techcrunch; the difference there was 300MB vs 520MB or so (which means that the page has about 100 iframes, of course).

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

#117

Post by nitrogen »

yAnonymous wrote: post #113
nitrogen wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most egregious site breakage from ad blockers is when sites can't handle the absence of their Adobe or Google JS. Some sites have large amounts of content that is only loaded via three levels of third-party-JS indirection. Others will try to fire an event to Google Analytics on every click, but if GA doesn't load, an error is thrown that prevents the click's default action. I was making a $1000-range purchase on…

>when sites can't handle the absence of their Adobe When sites that require flash break, isn't that a win for the user?

Adobe makes more than Flash. They have a number of user tracking, profiling, and A/B testing systems, plus an email delivery and segmentation system. Some or all of those things started as Omniture. Google also has Google Tag Manager, which is a third-party JS for injecting more third-party JS. When half your site's content is loaded by Adobe into "mbox"es, triggered by JS loaded by Google Tag Manager, it's a nightmare for real developers and end users alike even with everything working.

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

#118

Post by PhantomGremlin »

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…

With that in mind, in the future perhaps you could think twice before posting snarky comments based on your experiences from five years ago.

In a rational universe that would be a reasonable request. Too bad we don't live in a rational universe.

Bad experiences weigh much more heavily on us than good experiences. For example, there is a chain of stores I won't go to, because I bought some inferior products from them over 35 years ago. Is that rational? No. But it is human nature.

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

#119

Post by btgeekboy »

wila wrote: post #96
btgeekboy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any documentation on this? It's something I've been interested in setting up.

That depends completely on the router software that you use. You will need to use a custom firmware like dd-wrt, tomato, openWRT, etcetera. I run it here on tomato and use something similar to: http://www.linksysinfo.org/index.php?threads/auto-dl-hosts-f...

It's safe to assume I have a standard Linux system. I have an Ubiquiti EdgeRouter now, and a few regular x86_64 always-on systems behind it I can proxy traffic through if necessary.

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

#120

Post by padenot »

nandhp wrote: post #53
padenot wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is Mozilla jargon. Anything that is tracked in Bugzilla is a "bug". I've opened bug in Bugzilla to change the chair at my desk, for example (I work at Mozilla).

> Status: RESOLVED, VERIFIED, CLOSED Content: chair > Zarro Boogs found. I don't know what I expected -- there's no "Other > Desk furniture" in the products list of the public Bugzilla....

We've since switched to another system, bugzilla was apparently a bit hard to use for non-technical people, and the new tool has better workflow management features.
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