Honorable mention, privoxy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743261
Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs
181–190 of 419 posts
Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs
#182Earlier 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…
"This provides an engineering anecdote that adblocking is worth more than half a gig to a large fraction of the population" That's a reasonable conclusion only if people are aware that they're making the trade, which I suspect most users are not (otherwise this article would be rather boring)
I would suspect that most people don't come close to using all the ram in their computer in normal use. Whether they use adblock or not will not have any noticeable affect on the computer performance apart from the blocking of ads.
Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, having an option to pay for the site instead would just be crazy.
Having to pay to visit all of the sites out there which are currently using ads would pretty much ruin the internet for most people. Having a big banner at the top asking for donations seems to work rather well, though. See gnu.org and wikipedia.org for examples (though Wikipedia's donation campaign this year is a bit excessive IMO).
I consider them ads and use adblock to block those as well.
Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs
#184It's a chicken egg problem.
1) Website owners use ads to earn money (server and employee costs, revenue).
2) Several Ad networks create ads that influence and annoy users and track their browser habits. e.g. blinking buggy video ads with sound that sometimes even crash the flash plugin
3) Visitors install Adblock+ because they dislike intrusive ads that don't adhere to the browser privacy settings. Some websites are unusable without an ad-blocker. Many websites even crash the mobile browser.
4) Companies buy ads cheaper as ads are clicked in reality by clicking-bots and are worth less than years ago.
4) Website owner places more ads because the earn less for the same amount of served ads as last year and because more and more block all ads altogether.
5) Even more visitors install adblockers and turn them on for all websites.
6) Website owners introduce a paywall so that parts of their content or everything is behind closed doors for paying customers only.
7) The visitors switch to alternative website that offer comparable content for free, monetized by ads or maintained as hobby.
8) and so on...
Paywalls are not the solution. Another website will appear that offers comparable content for free. Example: The Microsoft Network (MSN 1) that was meant to replace the WWW in 1995 and shipped with Win95. Bill Gates had to rewrite his vision of the information highway, micro payments and Microsoft Network in his famous book "The Road Ahead", half a year later as MSN failed and WWW succeeded he released a second book edition that removed all references and now acknowledges the WWW. Pictures of MSN 1: http://winsupersite.com/windows-live/msn-inside-story
Everyone has to change a bit, to improve the current status:
* The ad-networks that still code flash-based ads should move to HTML5.
* The companies that buy ad-space from such ad-networks should care more about the ad-quality.
* The website owners should care more about which ad-network they select.
* The visitors should use less adblock-plugins.
* The WHATWG/W3C/browser developer should improve some situations with HTML 5.x so that there is no single reason for flash based ads.
Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Together with umatrix ( https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/ ) are the best chrome extensions Since I went back to firefox those are the only extensions I really miss, there is policeman ( https://github.com/futpib/policeman/ ) but it's not as good as them yet To whoever develop extensions, please don't focus only on chrome, firefox during the last months has become must better that it was before, if developers only c…
As my paranoia ramps up year on year, I now use Opera with µBlock. For me, it has the polish of Chrome with some nice extras, but without the increasingly creepy Googality. It works fine, although I've not tried µMatrix. (I have my defaults changed to DuckDuckGo. Usually connecting via a VPN.) I've whitelisted a few sites I like to support (a couple of webcomics, HaD etc). I have a lot of filters: "62,501 network fil…
There is a μ on the German QWERTZ keyboards.
Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs
#186> In Nethercote’s testing, he found that TechCrunch used around 194MB of RAM without ABP enabled 194MB for a single webpage that should mainly be text communicating a message. Does anyone else than me find this crazy?
Not if it has rendered the text out so that scrolling is super smooth, in addition to the javascript, css and html parsing and optimization overhead. Don't forget the pictures too.
Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs
#187This in your JS should hide site content from adblock users (adsense only):
window.hasOwnProperty('google_ad_block') || (document.body.innerHTML = 'Please disable adblock to use this page')Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs
#188I see nobody has posted it, so here is a very lightweight alternative - it redirects all known ad-hosting sites to 127.0.0.1 http://someonewhocares.org/hosts
I use this as well (The zero version) but I wonder if there are any performance hits from doing this. I would think not but I've had sites (on desktop and mobile) lock up while waiting for something to load. Most of the time I assume this is some scrolling or "navigation" plugin that hasn't loaded yet (and not ads) but I'd love to read an analysis on hosts vs adblock vs µBlock.
Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs
#189Noscript is not an option anymore. Too many sites rely on javascript. I'll take the memory hit every time to use adblock.
[deleted]
Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs
#190From the article: >"* The main problem, though, is the process by which ABP actually blocks ads. Basically, ABP inserts a massive CSS stylesheet — occupying around 4MB of RAM — into every single webpage that you visit, stripping out the ads.*" Isn't then the actual problem the way that Adblock+ removes the ads? Why not simply allow an API for a plugin to easily strip content from a site. If there is one already, then…
Well, plugins are allowed to run Javascript on the page, what other kind of "special API" would you need?