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

extremetech.com

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

#291

Post by fwn »

w1ntermute wrote: post #138
ferrari8608 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

FYI, you can hide the Wikipedia donation campaign banners by putting this in a userscript that @matches http://*.wikipedia.org/* : setTimeout(function() { fundraisingBanner.hide(); }, 1000);

This ublock custom rule worked for me:

  ||https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/special:bannerloader

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

#292

Post by nnethercote »

ben0x539 wrote: post #263

Sounds like if Mozilla wants to improve Firefox memory usage, they should work on blocking ads natively so people don't need Adblock Plus. <:D

You're going to love Tracking Protection: http://monica-at-mozilla.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/tracking-pr...

It's an in-development feature to block parts of websites that track you. In practice, it mostly blocks ads, and it blocks most ads. And it doesn't have the performance/memory hit of AdBlock Plus for two reasons:

* The domain matching is simpler (no regexps) and thus much faster.

* It doesn't use CSS to fix up the layout of pages that have had ads removed; it just leaves blank white rectangles. (AdBlock Plus has lots of complex and even site-specific CSS code to do this.)

(I've been told this by one of the Tracking Protection developers, though I may have got the details slightly wrong.)

In testing done by its developers, it speeds up the load time of the median page by 20%! So overall it gives more privacy, less page clutter, and faster browsing. Fantastic stuff.

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

#293

Post by pbreit »

43081j wrote: post #289
SwellJoe wrote: post #266

I use AdBlock Plus not because I don't want to see ads...I actually don't mind ads. I use it because I don't want auto-starting audio, ever . I have 30-60 tabs up at any given time. When an ad starts playing audio, it disrupts my entire workflow, possibly disturbs my partner sleeping next to me, etc. In short, auto-start audio in ads is quite simply so far outside of what I consider acceptable behavior, that I'm will…

Just enable click-to-play in chrome, on media plugins. Sound only ever really auto-plays from flash ads and such (though these days its possible with HTML5 and this likely won't stop such audio/video). Its an extra click and can make some sites a bit more difficult (e.g. beatport, tries to hide its flash so you cant click it to enable it), but it works for me.

Yep, should be able to disable autoplay via browser setting.

http://www.addictivetips.com/web/stop-auto-play-in-chrome-fi...

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

#294

Post by nnethercote »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #172

> 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?

> a single webpage that should mainly be text communicating a message

That was more or less true of the web in, say, 1995.

Today, a web browser is an advanced programming environment with broad multimedia capabilities (including audio, video, and 2D and 3D graphics) that also happens to have some excellent document presentation features relating to text and images.

(Edit: I previously said this much better here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743284)

You may think this is a bad thing, and that's a reasonable opinion to have. But if you think it's not true you'll only mislead yourself.

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

#295

Post by gorhill »

Yizahi wrote: post #228

Behold the power of the Time Machine - the text straight from the 90th-00th. Everyone was like "Oh, this new Windoze uses 500 megs when idle! Then 1000 megs! Then 2000 megs! etc. etc.". Come on people, we are buying our hardware precisely for this - to be used. Now this ET site with 28 spyware modules from random advertisers is telling me - "Don't use your CPU it will make it slower, also don't use too much RAM. Inst…

> we are buying our hardware precisely for this - to be used

I have a counterargument page dedicated to apologists of inefficient software: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Who-cares-about-effic...

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

#296

Post by Philadelphia »

chimeracoder wrote: post #218
matthewmacleod wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's bollocks - it's not in the slightest an ethical breach to do that. It's just advertising working with production to make the product. We're not talking about running advertorial or anything. The papers I've worked on usually had a little flexibility in terms of extra copy or advertising to populate pages as required.

> it's not in the slightest an ethical breach to do that. It's just advertising working with production to make the product. Well, that by definition would be considered an ethical violation at a paper like the Times. Not at a student paper, no, but at the New York Times, definitely.

No, that's entirely wrong. That's how the layout for a newspaper is established and the news budget (meaning what will fit in the paper) is set — it's mostly based on the size and requirements of the ads that will run in that day's paper. If you have a really important story (or a dearth of advertisers), you might add pages for editorial content without regard to ads and fill the layout holes with house ads, but the actual size of the paper is determined by your advertising. That's literally what's paying for the paper you're printing on.

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

#297

Post by boyaka »

MicroBerto wrote: post #20

People aren't using Adblock to conserve resources. They're using it to block ads and most are willing to take a performance hit to do so.

This is just not true (your first claim that is, I would say people use it for multiple reasons). Adblock can certainly conserve resources in some cases. I know one webpage that loads 2-3 very resource-intensive banner ads every 30 seconds or so. I've seen websites that do a lot worse too.

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

#298

Post by bigbugbag »

briandear wrote: post #66
jacquesm wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

bookmarks have been broken for quite a number of years now. UX is terrible and irrelevant to my workflow. I use two browsers with 100-150 tabs each and session management is lacking in web browsers. I use the sidebar and tab grouping to keep track.

My solution was to add a 8GB stick of RAM with the usual disabling of javascript by default, no iframes allowed and no flash installed with adblock and fanboy's lists.

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

#300

Post by Turing_Machine »

benbristow wrote: post #283
garethsaxby wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with that, in Windows at least, is that host lookups become a lot slower with a larger hosts file; a local caching DNS server with a block list is possibly a better solution, and one I think is already adopted by some.

Another issue with this design is that Adblock extensions hide the blocked elements, using the hosts file leaves loads of 404's all over websites and it looks rather ugly.

Way back when, I wrote a simple web server that ran on localhost that served empty files for any .html, .js, etc. request and 1x1 pixel images for any .gif, .jpg, etc. request.

It worked pretty good. As a poster upthread noted, though, the big issue with this approach is maintaining the list.

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