Live data from Hacker News

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

extremetech.com

311–320 of 419 posts

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

#311
Here's what I do for Firefox and AdBlock Plus:

Under "Filter Preferences", uncheck everything marked EasyList. Under "Custom Filters" add EasyList without element hiding rules and make sure it's checked. Restart. This speeds things up considerably.

On Chromium I don't use AdBlock Plus, it's too much of a memory hog. Instead, I use the much leaner and faster µBlock for dynamic filtering:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/

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

#312
post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Firefox gets slower with every update", I don't believe this is still the case. There have been significant performance improvements in recent versions of Firefox. If you haven't tried Firefox in a while, I'd recommend giving it another shot. By what I've seen lately, Firefox might be edging Chrome out in performance.

I still use Firefox for anything where I need to be logged in since I'm rather uncomfortable about using Google services combined with a Google browser - but it's definitely a significant performance downgrade.

Don't agree. My perception is that Firefox is faster now than it was two years ago, and today it's generally as fast as or faster than Chrome.

BTW, I'm another that won't log into Google services with a Google-owned browser: I usually use IE11 for that. But I use Firefox for Microsoft services ...

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

#313
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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....

Actually, you can turn that on now to check it out: http://www.jkwebtalks.com/2014/02/enable-multi-process-tabs-...

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

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I'm not claiming it's the best UX, and I have no particular affinity to this program, but it's really not hard to tell what it does, especially for the demographic here.

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

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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".

I'm not claiming it's the best UX, and I have no particular affinity to this program, but it's really not hard to tell what it does, especially for the demographic here.

Nor do I have any particular affiliation or affinity. It just sounds like poor UX/UI.

I guess the whole "hover over it if you're confused" thing is pretty established by now, so I'd say your original assessment is probably the correct one. I just want us (the industry) to get better at this stuff! :)

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

#316

I uninstalled right after hearing from Mozilla [1] about the effects of AdBlock Plus on Firefox. Since, then I'm blocking things manually. First I was using this [2] hosts file by Dan Pallock. But now I've switched to this Neocities [3] hosted site. I don't know who manages this site, but the entries are uniquely sorted from various sources, which includes entries from Dan Pallock's hosts file. Apart from this, I use…

There's also a Policeman [1] that works using fast and powerful domain-and-request-type matching. No thousands of injected CSS rules or anything like this, that persist and consume memory. Think of hosts file on steroids, that's able to differentiate between image, script and flash requests.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/policeman/

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

#317
Related

http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ HN Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6002544

Make sure localhost / 127.0.0.1 resolves to something though. A blank `index.html` in the root is lightweight enough. For the perfnerds, you can resolve it using lighthttpd

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

#318
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pretty poor UX if you ask me yup. Has been around since NT or maybe even longer..

the poor UX is not the Character Map It is having to open it every time you want to type the name of µSomething

The poor UX is the keyboard layout throwing away altgr.

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

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not claiming it's the best UX, and I have no particular affinity to this program, but it's really not hard to tell what it does, especially for the demographic here.

Nor do I have any particular affiliation or affinity. It just sounds like poor UX/UI. I guess the whole "hover over it if you're confused" thing is pretty established by now, so I'd say your original assessment is probably the correct one. I just want us (the industry) to get better at this stuff! :)

Fair enough; that's totally reasonable, and I agree with you. I guess I just had an objection to the post I originally replied to which (seemingly) had the attitude of it being impossible to tell what the button did. The UX could certainly be better, but it's not bad.

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

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Actually, you can turn that on now to check it out: http://www.jkwebtalks.com/2014/02/enable-multi-process-tabs-...

No, that uses a single process for all tabs.
Post reply on HN