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Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs

extremetech.com

61–70 of 419 posts

Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs

#61
I use DNS to block ads when control over the HOSTS file is not available to the user.

Works across all applications, e.g. browsers, apps, and requires no installation of third party software e.g. extensions.

I'm curious: do these ad blocking "solutions" operate as businesses? Do ad servers pay to be removed from blacklists? Pardon my ignorance.

Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs

#62
post #54
post #5

I’d rather pay a few dozen bucks to buy more RAM than running the risk of been infected by malware served from compromised ad servers. Not to mention the significant decrease in aesthetics/usability when pages include a dozen different ad areas.

I don't know about aesthetics. I've found that AdBlock actually destroys a lot of the symmetry since the page was designed with ad elements in place.

That could actually be a novel technique against ad blocking. Make the website dysfunctional if the ads can't be displayed.

Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs

#63
post #27
post #14

I used to not do Adblock, because you know, ads make the internet go round and all that. But with the "download here"-button ads, there is no way to know what button to press anymore. Now installing Adblock is a requirement.

Honestly, I've only seen the "tricky" Download Now buttons on shady video websites (read: those that have all the episodes of Seinfeld on them). Though I've had more and more invasive ads in newspaper sites (the fact that I get so many ads on NYT's site despite being a subscriber is frustrating to say the least), I do like keeping free websites running. I find using ABP to be somew immoral , violating the contract wi…

> the fact that I get so many ads on NYT's site despite being a subscriber is frustrating to say the least

Have you never seen the print edition of the NYT (or any other newspaper)? Since they just use news to fill in the otherwise blank areas between ads the motto really should be all the news that fits, we print.

Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs

#64
post #5

I’d rather pay a few dozen bucks to buy more RAM than running the risk of been infected by malware served from compromised ad servers. Not to mention the significant decrease in aesthetics/usability when pages include a dozen different ad areas.

If your browser is vulnerable to drive-by malware, blocking ads is the least of your problems! Most malware is not spread by ads.

Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs

#65
post #43

What kind of fucked up site has 10+ iframes per page, let alone hundreds? And the example site he uses takes 530megs to load even without addons. I'm sensing the issue is somewhere other than Adblock Plus.

The "fucked up" case highlights the fact that ABP injects 14,000+ CSS rules (with only EasyList) in every page and iframes on a page.

You could as well ask "What kind of fucked up add-on unconditionally injects minimum of 14K+ CSS rules per page? (assuming no iframe)".

The original point is that the approach is detrimental to Firefox the browser regardless of that stress test, and I can understand very well Firefox developers wanting to raise the issue [1], as the browser ends up taking the blame when resources are abused.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=988266

Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs

#66
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wonde…

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.

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.

Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs

#67
post #2

People are using µBlock now for precisely this reason. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/%C2%B5Block-vs.-ABP:-... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/%C2%B5block/cjpalh... https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

it probably needs a better way to whitelist sites/pages

I frankly don't know how to improve on clicking the big fat green button in the popup to whitelist a site (Ctrl-click for a specific page).

Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs

#68
post #61

I use DNS to block ads when control over the HOSTS file is not available to the user. Works across all applications, e.g. browsers, apps, and requires no installation of third party software e.g. extensions. I'm curious: do these ad blocking "solutions" operate as businesses? Do ad servers pay to be removed from blacklists? Pardon my ignorance.

[deleted]

Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs

#69

I wish the internet was usable without it.

This. The ongoing arms race between advertisers and adblockers damage content delivery, which is why I'm hoping for a solution which can replace ads in the near future. Maybe Google Contributor is onto something. I would recommend trying the Reader view in Safari (I'm sure there's similar functionality in other browsers) to read articles without clutter. Works like a charm.

Reader is especially killer in mobile. A huge percentage of sites are incredible horrible on mobile-- and it isn't even the ads as much as all of the sharing, pull quotes and modals. Why the heck do people have modals for mobile? The insanity of it.

Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs

#70
post #2

People are using µBlock now for precisely this reason. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/%C2%B5Block-vs.-ABP:-... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/%C2%B5block/cjpalh... https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

I tried µBlock but it seems to be extremely trigger happy. For example Youtube front page doesn't show any videos and Facebook doesn't load at all (basically it blocks everything other than its side bar). I can obviously white list those sites but my concern is that next time I visit some site for the first time I will not know if its broken or just µBlock acting up.

----- EDIT

I reinstalled the plugin and the problems went away. So far looks good.

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