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AdBlock Plus’s effect on Firefox’s memory usage

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: AdBlock Plus’s effect on Firefox’s memory usage

#111

Post by clarry »

Nursie wrote: post #37
VLM wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The first thing people complain about with browsers is ..." They changed the browser UI, either the browser devs or the site devs via stupid javascript tricks (messing with scrolling, etc). I got driveby download powned and my CC info stolen and five spam toolbars in the UI I can't get rid of. There are too many spammy ads. They make is as hard as humanly possible to use bookmarks to encourage the use of a search en…

Definitely. In a browser-on-pc setting, who even cares about memory any more? We have loads of it.

If you think everyone or even most people out there want to upgrade their computers every couple years, and go for models with lots of RAM in them.. I'm sorry, you're wrong. Some geeks might have 16G or 32G but that's it.

Besides, whatever happened to Web browsing being a lightweight activity accessible for everyone even on his grandma's old PC?

Re: AdBlock Plus’s effect on Firefox’s memory usage

#112

Post by throwaway7767 »

userbinator wrote: post #85
mp3geek wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Host files are very limited, and when you start dealing with anti-adblock scripts and other css/js scripts on some sites it falls apart. Basically hosts file was great 10+ years ago when the Web was new(ish) and Adblock was only used by a few. Now we're dealing with CSS, objects, subrequests, first party ad/tracking scripts. With all the features Adblock Plus gives us, far far more than just blocking xx and yy domain…

ABP is filtering content that's already been retrieved over the network and read into the browser. With hosts, the blocked content never makes it into my machine, which saves bandwidth. I think using both is better than either one alone. A hosts file to quickly remove most of the unwanted stuff, and ABP to finish off the rest that does get through.

I thought that was only the chrome version, since google does not want to implement features to allow adblockers to stop requests.

Firefox does support it, and I know that in the past adblock did stop the requests rather than hide elements.

Re: AdBlock Plus’s effect on Firefox’s memory usage

#114

Post by gorhill »

sspiff wrote: post #27
gorhill wrote: post #20

It's not just memory overhead, it is also CPU overhead. One approach is to write the filtering engine from scratch. It is what I did, without looking at ABP's code beforehand in order to ensure a clean slate mind. I didn't get it right the first time, I did spend quite a large amount of time benchmarking, measuring, prototyping, etc. Once I was satisfied I had finally had a solid code base, I went and benchmarked it…

As far as I can tell, HTTPSB is not available for Firefox, please fix! I would love to use something better than ABP (in terms of performance, it does content filtering just fine), but I'm not so desperate to abandon the (warning: subjective content ahead) greatest browser of all times to lower the memory footprint of an ad blocker.

Issue #86: https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/issues/86

Would be nice if someone forked and start to adapt to Firefox. I would of course work in concert as this would allow to identify parts of the code which is browser specific and which parts can be turned into an independent library.

Re: AdBlock Plus’s effect on Firefox’s memory usage

#115

Post by walls »

barrkel wrote: post #86
bru wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched from ABP to this hosts file a few months ago and I have zero regret. My browser's faster, lighter and ads are blocked just as well as with ABP. I actually even started splitting my hosts file: the layout is /etc/hosts ('compiled' version) /etc/hosts.d/ /etc/hosts.d/aaa-warning (warning reminding me to run `update-hosts` instead of modifying /etc/hosts. Appears atop the compiled file) /etc/hosts.d/adblock (…

Most of my adblock stuff is CSS based. I use element hiding helper to figure out which bits to kill. I have hundreds of these custom rules.

To be pedantic: That's not blocking, it's just hiding. They have vastly different implications.

Re: AdBlock Plus’s effect on Firefox’s memory usage

#116

Post by thegeomaster »

aidos wrote: post #60
dcc1 wrote: post #9

http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero/

I'd tried this in the past but my machine slowed to a crawl. I guess it was to do with the algorithm used for handling the list of hosts (this sounds like a job for a bloom filter). I've just tried the list you provided and it seems to be ok. Will try it for a while to see how I get on.

It'd be interesting to dive into parts of e.g. Linux source to see how it tests domains against the hosts file. It probably isn't doing anything as clever as Bloom, though, but who knows...

Re: AdBlock Plus’s effect on Firefox’s memory usage

#117

Post by chris_wot »

axx wrote: post #92

It's 2014. My computer has 12 Gigabytes of RAM. I don't give a shit, as long as i don't have to view those terrible stupid Ads. Advertisers, fix your practises and i will view your Ads again.

Well, I most certainly do care. Unfortunately, I've disabled ABP.

Re: AdBlock Plus’s effect on Firefox’s memory usage

#118

Post by gabriel34 »

nfoz wrote: post #89
nnethercote wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people think of a browser as a tool for displaying text and pictures, with maybe a bit of JS code and some CSS effects on the side. That was true in the late 90s, but these days a browser is actually a fully-fledged programming environment that also happens to have some incredibly sophisticated multimedia capabilities: text, images, video, audio, animations, 3d graphics, etc. The most popular websites run quite…

> That was true in the late 90s, but these days a browser is actually a fully-fledged programming environment that also happens to have some incredibly sophisticated multimedia capabilities: text, images, video, audio, animations, 3d graphics, etc. Maybe I just miss the 90s, but I would much rather have the simple content browser than a "full-fledged programming environment", especially since all of that content is c…

I tried disabling JS & cookies and whitelisting exceptions, but it was a pain. I ended up just using ghostery which is the opposite - blacklists exceptions, but with a 3rd party maintaining the list it became much better.

Re: AdBlock Plus’s effect on Firefox’s memory usage

#119

Post by gorhill »

losvedir wrote: post #94
gorhill wrote: post #20

It's not just memory overhead, it is also CPU overhead. One approach is to write the filtering engine from scratch. It is what I did, without looking at ABP's code beforehand in order to ensure a clean slate mind. I didn't get it right the first time, I did spend quite a large amount of time benchmarking, measuring, prototyping, etc. Once I was satisfied I had finally had a solid code base, I went and benchmarked it…

I've been using HTTPSB since the last time you answered a few questions for me on HN (about a week ago?) and I must say: stunning work! A quick question: is there a keyboard shortcut I'm missing to enable/disable the request blocking? For the time being I do Cmd+L, Cmd+C, Cmd+Shift+N, Cmd+V to copy the URL into a private browsing window, but it'd be nice to just temporarily enable full functionality on the page, and…

I will enter your comment in issue #184, so I can keep it in mind. I think this is a good idea.

Re: AdBlock Plus’s effect on Firefox’s memory usage

#120

Post by chris_wot »

thristian wrote: post #103
nfoz wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That was true in the late 90s, but these days a browser is actually a fully-fledged programming environment that also happens to have some incredibly sophisticated multimedia capabilities: text, images, video, audio, animations, 3d graphics, etc. Maybe I just miss the 90s, but I would much rather have the simple content browser than a "full-fledged programming environment", especially since all of that content is c…

If you want Dillo and/or w3m, they're still available!

Is Dillo still going strong?
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