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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

#131

Post by rane »

gorhill wrote: post #122
rane wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

Thanks. But this is exactly what I meant by micromanagement.

Plus I'm afraid that strict settings will break sites I haven't visited before without me knowing they're somehow broken.

Is there a way to configure the extension to just block ads?

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

#132

Post by aranjedeath »

Omniusaspirer wrote: post #75
Silhouette wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the risk of stating the obvious, if your site is ad-funded then annoying users who don't see your ads so they go away and don't come back is a win. If they bitch about it to their friends who also wouldn't see your ads and those friends don't visit in the first place, it is an even bigger win.

I'm not so sure this is "obvious". It presumes that those people will never refer anyone who would watch your ads, and also that search engines won't down rank you in results based on the number of people bailing from your site instantly/avoiding clicking on it.

If you've bought into the lexicon of marketing it is. They're stealing revenue from you.

If you haven't, you're an asshole and you're fucking your users for no reason at all (ads are no reason).

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

#133

Post by eli »

TarpitCarnivore wrote: post #54
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 (…

Have you been able to block stuff like Tynt, and other copy/paste triggered JS stuff?

http://www.tynt.com/opt_out

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

#134

Post by Rusky »

throwaway7767 wrote: post #112
userbinator wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Chrome has added an API to block requests: https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/webRequest

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

#135

Post by pdpi »

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.

Tons of people. There's all the people using old computers, because they're still plenty good (except when using applications written by people who think they don't have to worry about memory), and all the people on shoestring budgets using cheap computers that are for the most part good enough (except when using applications written by people who think they don't have to worry about memory).

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

#136

Post by diegocg »

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…

The problem is not the browser. The problem is that modern web pages use a lot of functionality, use a lot of JS libraries and thus require that "full-fledged programming environment". A browser that does not implement it will just not be able to visit modern web pages. A page such as cnn.com weights 2M - and images are just 450 KB of it. Gmail and G+ are between 7 and 8 MB.

Modern web pages are programs and many are becoming bloated, and there is nothing magical a browser can do to avoid it.

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

#138

Post by Shivetya »

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…

at one time I could not use this add on and visit cycle trader or auto trader without losing all the memory on my system.

For some odd reason it never did that on my Mac, is there a real difference between firefox osx and Windows?

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

#139

Post by astrobe_ »

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…

Your best bet is text-based browsers: Lynx, Elinks, or mayve Emacs/W3M. On simple sites like HN, they are more or less usable.

I also sometimes wish the Web were just serving data in an easily processable format, and let the user decide what and how they are presented. Of course this would definitely and completely defeat the ads-supported scheme on which sits Internet. An ads-free Web would probably require the resources (media files, services, storage space, bandwidth, etc.) to be massively distributed among the PCs of the end-user, who are already paying for bandwidth, processing power and storage anyway. But it would also be quite inefficient as it would require equally massive fault tolerance.

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

#140

Post by keithpeter »

chris_wot wrote: post #120
thristian wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is Dillo still going strong?

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8403291/dillo.png

Xubuntu 14.04 has version 3.0.3 with docs dated April 2013

You won't be logging into dropbox with dillo alas!

Mighty fast for reading and cat pictures.

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