Live data from Hacker News

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

extremetech.com

151–160 of 419 posts

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

#151
post #19
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

Too bad its's not for Firefox

I use Bluhell Firewall, it isn't as good as ABP but it is definitely better than nothing and so light

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

#153

There was a very good discussion [1] about this 8 months ago when I realized the same [2]. I suggest try HTTP Switchboard instead (see the previous thread). [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7765758 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7765904

I am not maintaining HTTPSB anymore. I refactored HTTPSB into uBlock/uMatrix. Many cringing usability issues[1] have been fixed with uMatrix, which is different enough from HTTPSB that I could not publish it as a newer version of HTTPSB. [1] https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/wiki/Changes-from-HTTP-Sw...

Thanks! I did not know about this, I will definitely use them.

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

#154

A bit off topic, but could someone explain to me why it's so difficult for a browser (or extension) to effectively block 100% of all pop-ups/pop-unders? I realize that these account for only a fraction of ads, but they are really annoying and it seems that these should be the easiest to detect; doesn't this essentially boil down to a few specific API calls? For the few cases that a pop-up/pop-under is legitimate (rea…

Effectively you're asking for all document.createElement calls to be blocked. Those are used for all sorts of things that aren't ads or popups. Blocking that would probably cause a very large percent of pages to be completely broken.

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

#155
post #57

Noscript is not an option anymore. Too many sites rely on javascript. I'll take the memory hit every time to use adblock.

Blocking scripts is still a good habit. Many web sites requires scripts to work properly, but then for many web sites a lot of users won't really care whether all the "features" work, so long as they display the important content just fine.

For example, for someone just wanting to casually browse on random web sites, blocking 3rd-party scripts/frames is no hurdle, as the important content most of the time can be viewed.

Examples: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-Be...

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

#156
post #57

Noscript is not an option anymore. Too many sites rely on javascript. I'll take the memory hit every time to use adblock.

Blocking third-party scripts while allowing first-party scripts works just fine on most sites. You may have to whitelist several CDN domains, but you can blacklist the ad network domains and get most of the benefits.

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

#157
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flashblock is my middleground. The advertisers can have images, but the worst offenders are the Flash ads, and they get blocked.

Flashblock is not needed on Chrome - go to settings/advanced/content settings/plugins and select "click to play". Now flash will not run automatically. But you can decide to click on something and allow it to play if you want. Works great - no plugin needed.

Same in Firefox.

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2012/10/11/click-to-play-p...

Though I just never bothered installing Flash. If I need Flash for a site, I use Chrome (which comes with Flash embedded, I believe).

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

#158

He's definitely on to something here, FF with a hundred or so tabs open: With ABP: 12961 XXXXXX 20 0 2615960 1.483g 58692 S 45.2 9.5 2:13.00 firefox Without: 13098 XXXXXX 20 0 2157212 1.109g 57476 R 142.6 7.1 1:26.25 firefox Both after a complete stop and start of the browser, restoring every tab by activating it.

I guess the problem here is there is no way to cache this css injection. Maybe FF devs should do something about it instead of just whining about how an add-on is unable to handle the browser's shortcomings.

We could say the same about jQuery or bootstrap. You could have pages with many iFrames to other pages using the same js or css files. Right now these pages waste memory on the browsers too...

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

#159
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 .

"they just use news to fill in the otherwise blank areas between ads" That is pretty much literally true. When I worked on a student newspaper, it was pretty common for the advertising manager to rush in to the editorial offices and say things like "I've just sold another full-page ad, so we're going to be printing extra pages - do you have any copy to fill them?"

> When I worked on a student newspaper, it was pretty common for the advertising manager to rush in to the editorial offices and say things like "I've just sold another full-page ad, so we're going to be printing extra pages - do you have any copy to fill them?"

Perhaps at a student paper, though that's considered a pretty huge ethical breach. I can attest that the New York Times definitely does not do that; they take this separation very seriously. Even at their headquarters, as of relatively recently, business and editorial enter through separate elevators, as they are on opposite sides of the building.

There definitely are publications without such strong and heavily enforced senses of editorial ethics, but the New York Times is not one of them.

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

#160
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.

Actually, that's not crazy. Ads, social widgets (the Facebook Like button), third party comment boxes, etc. all render in iframes.
Post reply on HN