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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

#301

Post by [deleted] »

nnethercote wrote: post #294
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: http…

[deleted]

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

#304

Post by curiously »

gorhill wrote: post #285
curiously wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

does this happen only when you click the ublock and it opens a popup window or with any extension popup UI?

Any extension popup UI, which appears when you click an extension icon. The more complicated the HTML document in the popup, the larger the leak.

what about extensions without a popup UI?

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

#305

Post by cerrelio »

frik wrote: post #184

It'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…

More of a vicious cycle.

The ad networks bare most of the blame because they face a moral hazard. They can either deny annoying ads and lose revenue, or accept them and push the risk of adverse events to the publisher. The publisher will respond as you describe above. Ultimately the publisher fizzles out and their ad network drops them for non-performance.

Most ad networks appear to be willing to accept trashy ads in lieu of instituting quality controls.

This is my experience in working at a publishing network that did not have its own ad server.

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

#307

Post by lomnakkus »

_asummers wrote: post #284
pjlegato wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not at all obvious what that button does. The icon is typically associated with "power on/off." While I can see how this is supposed to suggest whitelisting in an abstract and metaphoric sense, making that connection is a bit of a stretch, particularly for casual users. I suggest removing the icon and just putting a plain old checkbox with a label that says "Whitelist Site".

If you hover over it, it tells you exactly what it does.

"hover over it to find out what it does" does not constitute good UX unless you're talking about a toolbar with a multitude of icons which cannot all (by sheer numbers) be "intuitive".

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

#308

Post by scholia »

niklasni1 wrote: post #268
elvis635 wrote: post #11

Earlier 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…

What was wrong with Firefox? I've used it every day since starting a new job seven months ago and I've not noticed any issues with it.

Firefox has improved a lot and it has been good for more than I year (I switched back in the middle of last year). Before that it was slower than Chrome, and it crashed when trying to read very large pages (eg a tumblr page of gifs).

Google helped to close the gap by making Chrome more bloated and much more unstable.

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

#309

Post by scholia »

krylon wrote: post #251
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.

I so agree! I have been annoyed at Firefox's resource hunger for a couple of years, now, and I have been aware of ABP being a major factor in that, too, but all in all, I think it is still worth it. It is a sad reflection on the state of advertisement, but lacking any viable alternatives, using an adblocker (and NoScript) is pretty much non-negotiable to me. I am always apalled when I have to use a browser without an…

Firefox is actually much less resource-hungry than Chrome, though that's largely because it doesn't (yet) use different processes for different tabs....

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

#310

Post by linuxhansl »

I just maintain my own small custom list, all automatic lists are disabled. Ads are OK unless they are animated, IMHO. Flash is totally out of course. In fact I think I am doing these advertisers a favor since I do keep a mental list of who not to buy from, that list includes folks who have animated and flash ads (and those who advertise on Fox News, but that is a different story).

So I usually just block ads that are really obnoxious. Every few months I review the list and remove any entry that was filtered less than 10 times or so.

That has two advantages. First I get to control what is filtered, and second it prevents that list from growing so much.

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