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Show HN: Where Adblock+ injects 20K CSS rules, HTTPSB injects one

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31–40 of 183 posts

Re: Show HN: Where Adblock+ injects 20K CSS rules, HTTPSB injects one

#31
post #15

The thing with all these plugins, I shouldn't care as a user, I should be informed about these issues. If you use http://www.sublimetext.com/ you will get a dialog when scripts are running slow, as in, "Script XYZ took more than 1 second to process this file, you can disable it" All I want in FF or Chrome is the same. "Adblock blocked the UI for 4 seconds" "Adblock increased memory consumption by double" Or they coul…

Chrome shows the memory consumption of plugin here : chrome://memory-redirect/

I don't think most users want pop-ups about technical details in browsers. Sublime text is a different story - it's meant for tech folks.

Re: Show HN: Where Adblock+ injects 20K CSS rules, HTTPSB injects one

#32

Given that advertising pays for a lot of the services we all use, the use of Adblock and similar programs constitutes defection in game theory terms - the more people who do it, the worse off we all are - which means even if you choose to do it yourself (I personally don't), it is against your interests to encourage other people to do it. Also, given that computing is one of very few areas of technology in which our…

Care more about others user-experience and safety (I primarily use ABP and NoScript to block malware attacks) than the fact that if advertising becomes less effective other methods to pay for websites will have to be developed, so I recommend people use ABP.

Also, advertising isn't "free", there is still a cost even if I am not seeing the money directly leave my wallet every time I see an ad. I would rather the ad supported model died out, the only reason it came to dominate is because there wasn't the technology to support other options when newspapers were first developed.

Re: Show HN: Where Adblock+ injects 20K CSS rules, HTTPSB injects one

#33
post #31
post #15

The thing with all these plugins, I shouldn't care as a user, I should be informed about these issues. If you use http://www.sublimetext.com/ you will get a dialog when scripts are running slow, as in, "Script XYZ took more than 1 second to process this file, you can disable it" All I want in FF or Chrome is the same. "Adblock blocked the UI for 4 seconds" "Adblock increased memory consumption by double" Or they coul…

Chrome shows the memory consumption of plugin here : chrome://memory-redirect/ I don't think most users want pop-ups about technical details in browsers. Sublime text is a different story - it's meant for tech folks.

Plugin memory usage tracking is only realistically possible for Chrome where plugins run in a sandbox with a really limited API. Even then, if the plugin manages to allocate memory inside a page's sandbox (for example, by injecting some CSS or JS in there), the reporting will be wrong.

The adblock plus problem is in fact one of those - it injects styles into pages in order to filter ads, which increases the memory footprint of the page. So neither Firefox nor Chrome can tell you 'adblock plus is increasing memory usage by X', because the memory usage is hidden along with everything else owned by the page, not by the addon.

Re: Show HN: Where Adblock+ injects 20K CSS rules, HTTPSB injects one

#34

Given that advertising pays for a lot of the services we all use, the use of Adblock and similar programs constitutes defection in game theory terms - the more people who do it, the worse off we all are - which means even if you choose to do it yourself (I personally don't), it is against your interests to encourage other people to do it. Also, given that computing is one of very few areas of technology in which our…

I definitely agree that we take a lot of services for granted, but I don't think ads are the answer. For instance, a lot of sites I use daily accept donations (Reddit, Last.fm) and they offer some premium features for people who need them. Ads can be also incredibly annoying and sometimes considerably increase loading times.

Re: Show HN: Where Adblock+ injects 20K CSS rules, HTTPSB injects one

#35

I rage quit Firefox years ago because it's impossible to discuss it's critical perf issues without people pointing shifting blame to plugins. It got so bad I ran clean installs that never had a plugin ever, still had perf issues, and people on the internet simply refused Firefox could be at fault. I switched to Chrome and have never looked back. I also have never had a single issue with any AdBlock plugin in Chrome.…

I run Chrome as my general browser and Firefox for development. So I use both in anger every day. I must say that FF has caught up, plus it feels like Chrome is starting to fall behind -- I regularly get lockups in Chrome (particularly GMail) and FF has made great strides. To the point that I might flip and use FF for my everyday work too.

Exactly right. Everything is comparative. If Chrome never appeared in the first place, Firefox may well still reign supreme. The problem is Chrome first appeared so god damn fast, and has better caching, advance / pre DNS lookup, rendering and responsiveness, startup speed etc. Firefox looked the IE of its days. Then Firefox did improve, ( at its own pace ) and Chrome manage to slip behind in multiple areas.

But i really wanted a third choice, WebKit based Browser that is Firefox Like ( Tab OverFlow. ) Or may be i should just buy a Mac.

Re: Show HN: Where Adblock+ injects 20K CSS rules, HTTPSB injects one

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use tabs/windows as a todo list. I have 84 tabs open in my main window, and 36 windows open. Mostly I have 1 window per task, each with a few to a dozen tabs of related stuff. When I complete a task (or decide not to pursue it) I close the window. It's not the best way of organizing, but it actually fits my ADD/scattershot style of working pretty well.

using tools like tab-snap and grab-your-tabs, you can get dump of yours tabs incase you want to pursue things later on

I used to do that - then the "saved tabs" just piled up. Having a lot of tabs open just suits my workflow, so I enjoy a browser that supports it.

Re: Show HN: Where Adblock+ injects 20K CSS rules, HTTPSB injects one

#37

Given that advertising pays for a lot of the services we all use, the use of Adblock and similar programs constitutes defection in game theory terms - the more people who do it, the worse off we all are - which means even if you choose to do it yourself (I personally don't), it is against your interests to encourage other people to do it. Also, given that computing is one of very few areas of technology in which our…

Dont know why you got downvoted. But I agree that advertising is the key to web site revenue. Since the amount of people willing to pay are in extreme minorities.

I think the key is web page speed. Advertising slow down the page a lot and have adverse effect. Many uses Adblock / Ghostery just to speed up their internet browsing.

Re: Show HN: Where Adblock+ injects 20K CSS rules, HTTPSB injects one

#38
Could someone explain why Adblock injects CSS rules into the document? I presume it's to hide the ads, but what I don't understand is why that's the way it hides the ads. Why not simply remove the element containing the ad¹ instead? Additionally, presuming my earlier assumption is correct, if you hide the element with CSS, doesn't the browser still need to fetch the ad?

¹Get rid of as much crap ad HTML as possible. Ads seem to come layered in all manner of divs and iframes.

Re: Show HN: Where Adblock+ injects 20K CSS rules, HTTPSB injects one

#39

Given that advertising pays for a lot of the services we all use, the use of Adblock and similar programs constitutes defection in game theory terms - the more people who do it, the worse off we all are - which means even if you choose to do it yourself (I personally don't), it is against your interests to encourage other people to do it. Also, given that computing is one of very few areas of technology in which our…

You could argue the opposite in "game theoretic terms" since much of the advertising industry lives off user-tracking and privacy violations. It's bad privacy hygiene to allow all that tracking into your browser.

(Though I've switched to privacy badger since it's not the advertising in itself that's bad.)

Re: Show HN: Where Adblock+ injects 20K CSS rules, HTTPSB injects one

#40

Could someone explain why Adblock injects CSS rules into the document? I presume it's to hide the ads, but what I don't understand is why that's the way it hides the ads. Why not simply remove the element containing the ad¹ instead? Additionally, presuming my earlier assumption is correct, if you hide the element with CSS, doesn't the browser still need to fetch the ad? ¹Get rid of as much crap ad HTML as possible. A…

Removing the ad from the DOM might cause JavaScript errors that fudges up the site. By making the element invisible it's still "there".
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