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Adblockers Performance Study

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Re: Adblockers Performance Study

#81
post #76

So Ghostery benchmarks and is the fastest? Fine. But Ghostery does not belong in that test at all. Of course it can be faster. It misses a lot of the most important features! Like custom lists. Totally an ad.

Haha, the whole article is focused on Ghostery against Them.

Re: Adblockers Performance Study

#82
post #61

Faster still is DNS-based, network-wide blocking with pi hole.

If that works for you, that's great. But it's a pretty crude tool. Kind of like wood carving with a chainsaw; some people swear by it and it's undeniably efficient, but other tools give you more delicate control. I wouldn't go without ublock origin's cosmetic filters which I use to block many things that aren't ads (such as those annoying floating bars at the top and bottom of the screen a lot of websites use just to annoy users (sorry, "improve conversion") and waste vertical screen space.) uMatrix (and to a lesser degree, advanced mode in ublock origin) also lets you differentiate between blocking on first party or 3rd party. For instance I block youtube on every website except youtube.com

Re: Adblockers Performance Study

#83
post #76

So Ghostery benchmarks and is the fastest? Fine. But Ghostery does not belong in that test at all. Of course it can be faster. It misses a lot of the most important features! Like custom lists. Totally an ad.

Scroll to the footer and you'll see that this is Ghostery's website.

I wouldn't really call promoting their own product on their own webpage an ad.

Re: Adblockers Performance Study

#85
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, dislaimer: I worked on this study. Thank you for your comment. To me this reaction from the Chromium devs is missing one of the most fundamental issues. I'm not fundamentally against the declarative API because of technical limitations; I am against it because it is a strong innovation lock. The current extension ecosystem is flexible enough to allow hundreds (maybe thousands) of people to actively work on priva…

Speaking as a user (and early developer) of Safari's content blockers; I have almost never run into an issue with them. What kind of development do you fear will be stifled by Apple and Google not having incentives to improve the blocking (which I find somewhat strange in the former case, anyways)?

The difference is categorical. The current web request APIs can delay approval/rejection of any request for an indefinite amount of time to perform arbitrary computation (including IO or talking to other extensions) to decide. It can also be stateful.

This doesn't just knock the power of your adblocker down from Type-0 to Type-4 of the chomsky hierarchy, it also limits the inputs it can act on.

As an example, if I wanted an adblocker that looks at the DOM or javascript state of a page before allowing a request to load an iframe this would have to happen asynchronously since it means communicating with the page context. You can't do this declarative style.

Or if one wanted to implement a "click to play" style tool for iframes one would have to hold the request indefinitely until the user approves. This probably isn't a good idea for technical reasons, but at least it is a possibility with current APIs.

Re: Adblockers Performance Study

#86

> This work was motivated by one of the claims formulated in the Manifest V3 proposal of the Chromium project: "the extension then performs arbitrary (and potentially very slow) JavaScript", talking about content-blockers' ability to process all network requests. From the measurements, we do not think this claim holds, as all popular content-blockers are already very efficient and should not incur any noticeable slow…

Slowing down requests can be intentional, so even putting a cap on it would limit legitimate usecases. Instead the information should simply be surfaced to the user so they can decide to remove the extension if they don't want the slowdowns.

Re: Adblockers Performance Study

#88
post #15

FWIW, Chromium devs have just responded[1] to the massive amount of feedback they got on the mailing list, like [2] and [3]. One of the main pain points raised was the lack of any way to dynamically add rules, as well as the low maximum number of rules allowed (30k). Seems they've decided to support dynamic rule addition, as well as increasing the number of rules, though probably not by orders of magnitude by the sou…

Hey, dislaimer: I worked on this study. Thank you for your comment. To me this reaction from the Chromium devs is missing one of the most fundamental issues. I'm not fundamentally against the declarative API because of technical limitations; I am against it because it is a strong innovation lock. The current extension ecosystem is flexible enough to allow hundreds (maybe thousands) of people to actively work on priva…

I'm hoping that Firefox is once again seen as a viable alternative, that “power users” would consider switching to if Chrome falls behind.

Re: Adblockers Performance Study

#89
I'm surprised that Brave performs so poorly. Isn't the whole point of having a dedicated privacy-aware browser supposed to be so that the ad/tracker blocking code can be written directly in C++ and not have to run in Javascript and talk over plugin APIs?

Maybe these results are only applicable to the desktop version of Brave?

Re: Adblockers Performance Study

#90
post #83
post #76

So Ghostery benchmarks and is the fastest? Fine. But Ghostery does not belong in that test at all. Of course it can be faster. It misses a lot of the most important features! Like custom lists. Totally an ad.

Scroll to the footer and you'll see that this is Ghostery's website. I wouldn't really call promoting their own product on their own webpage an ad.

It's still an advertisement for them, it's just not shilling (or "paid content" or whatever fake blogs are called these days.)
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