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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

#171

Post by warfangle »

astrobe_ wrote: post #139
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…

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 reso…

> 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.

I think we tried that approach with RSS.

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

#172

Post by RobotCaleb »

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…

With HTTPSB installed do I need to continue to run adblock, ghostery, and disconnect?

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

#173

Post by keeperofdakeys »

the8472 wrote: post #152
alyandon wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The beta version also supports blacklists, which brings it a bit closer to HTTPSB. https://www.requestpolicy.com/1.0.html

Unfortunately the developer is MIA, so the few bugs in the beta aren't going to be fixed anything soon. The most important feature of the beta is wildcard support, so you don't need to add every cloudfront sub-domain manually.

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

#174

Post by bru »

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.

A quick dive brought me to glibc: seems like everything is done in `resolv/gethnamaddr.c`. Look for `_PATH_HOSTS` mentions: it is defined as "/etc/hosts/". The parsing seems done by the function `gethtent`. However it returns a single `hostent`...

I'll try to understand it tonight.

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

#175

Post by gorhill »

RobotCaleb wrote: post #172
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…

With HTTPSB installed do I need to continue to run adblock, ghostery, and disconnect?

It all depends how you use HTTPSB, I can't decide for you.

For one thing, HTTPSB doesn't hide DOM elements (I consider this out of its primary purpose), so if you still want this feature, you will have to keep ABP (or whatever equivalent does element hiding).

As for Ghostery or Disconnect, they still can be useful if you use HTTPSB in a permissive way (allow-all/block-exceptionally).

You could even use HTTPSB to block nothing at all, but as a mere reporting tool (with very low footprint), to find out what the other blockers did not block, as net requests will still be reported in the matrix.

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

#176

Post by nirvdrum »

diegocg wrote: post #136
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…

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…

The other half to this story is many web developers think the browser will magically clean up for them. I've lost track of how many sites I leave open in the background only to come back and find they're using > 1 GB RAM. I can always tell when it happens though because my laptop fan kicks on seemingly randomly.

With a bit of profiling it's usually that these sites just constantly append to the DOM. Without using circular buffers or otherwise cleaning up, eventually the CPU gets pegged doing constant GC. JS and Web development don't obviate the need for fundamentals and good programming practices.

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

#177

Post by sliverstorm »

RobotCaleb wrote: post #172
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…

With HTTPSB installed do I need to continue to run adblock, ghostery, and disconnect?

It seems to have noscript-level manipulation functionality, which I believe means "no". It appears to be able to block anything & everything, so you would just need to make sure you have the right filtering settings.

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

#178

Post by RobotCaleb »

gorhill wrote: post #175
RobotCaleb wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With HTTPSB installed do I need to continue to run adblock, ghostery, and disconnect?

It all depends how you use HTTPSB, I can't decide for you. For one thing, HTTPSB doesn't hide DOM elements (I consider this out of its primary purpose), so if you still want this feature, you will have to keep ABP (or whatever equivalent does element hiding). As for Ghostery or Disconnect, they still can be useful if you use HTTPSB in a permissive way (allow-all/block-exceptionally). You could even use HTTPSB to bloc…

Okay, I'll spend some more time with it.

While I have your ear, can I request color blind compatibility?

http://i.imgur.com/WHA3BHw.png

I think there are red and green elements there, but can't tell which is which. Also, I don't know how to set them to red or green specifically as I can't seem them. :)

Could you maybe include a check mark and an X or some other non-color dependent means of portraying that information?

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

#179

Post by sliverstorm »

rane wrote: post #131
gorhill wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm with this guy, I don't really want to spend much time filtering/selecting. If I can block 90% of the crap in seconds vs. 99.9% of the crap with several day's investment in customizing the filtering, I'll take 90% please.

Thanks for providing the "adblock-like" preset, that was just what I was looking for. Then from here, if/when I run into particularly horrific js, I can block it one-by-one.

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

#180

Post by aw3c2 »

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…

Since everyone is talking about HTTPSB here, one wish from me. I think it would be easier to use, especially for newbies, if you would use text everywhere instead of icons.

I am also a bit confused if settings apply to the current domain only or not, some behaviour suggests they are global but I have to test this.

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