There's a couple inaccurate things in that article that stood out at me. It should be pretty easy to measure the CPU hit when running ABP. It looks like the author is running windows so he should be able to use perfmon. He also mentions that "As with all proxy servers, though, the one caveat is that it doesn’t work with HTTPS connections" which is very much wrong.
Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs
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Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs
#322There's a couple inaccurate things in that article that stood out at me. It should be pretty easy to measure the CPU hit when running ABP. It looks like the author is running windows so he should be able to use perfmon. He also mentions that "As with all proxy servers, though, the one caveat is that it doesn’t work with HTTPS connections" which is very much wrong.
Also, the article's claim that most pages on the web make use of several iframes is laughable conjecture. Using their own site's poorly put-together home page as an example does not prove their point. And claiming that all free content on the web only exists because of advertising is disingenuous, to say the least.
Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs
#323I’d rather pay a few dozen bucks to buy more RAM than running the risk of been infected by malware served from compromised ad servers. Not to mention the significant decrease in aesthetics/usability when pages include a dozen different ad areas.
I don't know about aesthetics. I've found that AdBlock actually destroys a lot of the symmetry since the page was designed with ad elements in place.
I never notice this. I can almost always never tell where the ads actually were.
Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs
#324What 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.
No, they may render in iframes; iframes are certainly not a requirement for any of those features, and some (the original commenter included, I suspect) might consider them a heavy-handed approach to the problem.
Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs
#325It'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…
"Paywalls are not the solution. Another website will appear that offers comparable content for free."
But as you've described it, that 'other website' is far inferior: it contains crap-loads of advertising that I need to take steps to remove in order to make the site usable. In such cases, I'd far rather pay a tiny amount of money to view unencumbered content.
Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs
#326I 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.
Click-to-play on plugins often breaks sites that use Flash ads as overlays. The ads often have the "close this ad" in the Flash code itself, making it impossible to kill the ad layer without activating the plugin. (In my more cynical moments, I wonder whether this behavior is by design.)
Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs
#327Why would this even matter with the type of machines we have today? I'm sure your 8gigs can handle a little Ad Block.
Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Firefox differs from Chrome in that it will enable Flash for a whole page, rather than per-element. This means you still need an extension for blocking Flash ads on Flash video sites.
Firefox's model is better, I think. Plenty of sites use hidden flash videos for various utility functionality. How are you supposed to click on these hidden videos so that you can enable them?
Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
That really is a problem and it took me a while to figure out that sites weren't actually/necessarily endorsing those ads. There should be an easier way of black/white listing certain types of ads when setting up adsense.
Is actually very easy to solve. When someone wants to run an ad on your ad network. The vetting process should be more than "how much money you got?" If not for their own sakes anyway. Ad block needs to continue to run rampant over this "internet economy" because advertisers need to come to terms with the fact that now a days users get to choose what they see and how they see it. Maybe one day it will occur to someon…
It's not easy, because there isn't really much of a vetting process on most ad networks; everything possible is automated.
You may not mind seeing that industry die, but until you start paying for visiting websites, you'll have to amend that to say "I don't mind seeing the internet die".
Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, having an option to pay for the site instead would just be crazy.
Google's actually testing this out - http://consumerist.com/2014/11/20/googles-new-contributor-fe...
Doomed to fail since Google takes a chunk and it still leaves all the content available to anyone with adblock. It'll get some small use I'm sure but not enough to be notable.