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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

#121

Post by alyandon »

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.

Take a look at the RequestPolicy add-on for FF. It allows fine grained control over resource requests pages are allowed to make.

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

#122

Post by gorhill »

rane wrote: post #91
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…

Just installed the extension and it seems great. Particularly like the matrix UI for allowing/blocking things. However, I definitely don't want to micromanage things like accepting scripts and cookies for certain sites I use. Is there a way to make it work essentially the same way as AdBlock does? Tried to look in the wiki but didn't find anything.

You can select a "scope" (top-left cell in the popup) which will tells where the rules apply. You can set it to automatically create a temporary domain-level scope when landing on a web page (in Settings tab), and if you select this, I suggest you also select "Auto-delete temporary scopes".

Now any rules will apply only to that scope. For web sites you use regularly, just lock down these rules for that scope, and they will be remembered every time you visit that particular domain.

This is actually the preferred way to use the extension, but I did not make it the default currently.

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

#123

Post by VoxPelli »

raverbashing wrote: post #101
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.

One of the best ad-blockers is actually called FlashBlock (not sure this is the name today) It will remove around 90% of obnoxiousness...

Or you just go to Tools > Addons > Plugins and chose to have Firefox ask you before it activates the Flash plugin for a page – same functionality I think?

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

#124

Post by peterwwillis »

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…

> Anyone want to write a browser engine that skips all the modern BS and just does a good job delivering mostly-static webpages?

Over 10 years ago, someone did this with Mozilla Suite.

They called it "Phoenix". Some trademarking issues prompted them to rename it to "Firebird", but that name was also used by a popular database, so they finally renamed it again to "Firefox".

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

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

#125

Post by migbac »

bru wrote: post #43
dcc1 wrote: post #9

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

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 (…

I made a simple script that merges, and removes duplicates from different sources: https://gist.github.com/louima/878171fc67d797cfcef4

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

#126

Post by CJefferson »

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…

Such a webbrowser would be unable to render a large chunk of the internet, which doesn't sound overly useful.

I'm sure if you dug up a copy of an early netscape version it would be very fast on a modern machine, while failing to render most of the internet, if that's what you want.

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

#127

Post by gorhill »

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.

Regarding ABP, there are two kind of filters, the net request filters and the DOM content filters.

The net request filters do prevent net requests from being made.

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

#128

Post by raverbashing »

VoxPelli wrote: post #123
raverbashing wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the best ad-blockers is actually called FlashBlock (not sure this is the name today) It will remove around 90% of obnoxiousness...

Or you just go to Tools > Addons > Plugins and chose to have Firefox ask you before it activates the Flash plugin for a page – same functionality I think?

Good, looks like it's a new feature.

Yeah, this would be more or less the same functionality (FlashBlock makes it per item, so you can, for example see a video but not activate the other elements)

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

#129

Post by riquito »

peterwwillis wrote: post #124
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…

> Anyone want to write a browser engine that skips all the modern BS and just does a good job delivering mostly-static webpages? Over 10 years ago, someone did this with Mozilla Suite. They called it "Phoenix". Some trademarking issues prompted them to rename it to "Firebird", but that name was also used by a popular database, so they finally renamed it again to "Firefox". Those who cannot remember the past are conde…

Firefox was never meant to deliver "mostly-static webpages" and "skip all the modern BS".

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

#130

Post by iopq »

userbinator wrote: post #80
Omniusaspirer wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty rare that I want an application to use less ram these days, if anything I wish more programs would take full advantage of it.

Firefox can use all my RAM if I get great page load times and my other applications don't suffer. if anything I wish more programs would take full advantage of it. If every single application behaved like it owned all the memory on your machine, you would have a pretty horrible experience as they'll be basically fighting over what's available and likely hitting the swapfile. On the contrary, I do wish developers woul…

I have 16 gigs of RAM. I'd love to see every program use as much RAM usefully as possible. I don't want programs to write temp files to the drive. I want things to be done in RAM as much as possible to avoid wearing out the SSD.

In fact, every application DOES behave like it owns all of the RAM on the machine. This is what virtual address space does, it's pretending that each program has access to any place in the memory.

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