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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

#191

Post by sentenza »

pdpi wrote: post #135
Nursie wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Also, people who let their machine and browser rund 24/7. I'm currently stuck with an 8GB machine because I hit the maximum RAM supported by the mainboard and I don't have the time to go through a full productive machine migration right now.

So I restart my browser every 48 to 72 hours to reduce the memory footprint (which is one of those clunky "hacks", but it still works).

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

#192

Post by nfoz »

warfangle wrote: post #171
astrobe_ wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And RSS is great. What are you getting at?

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

#193

Post by alyandon »

keeperofdakeys wrote: post #173
the8472 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I did not like the beta interface for RequestPolicy and I hacked in support for using regex matching for whitelist entries so CDN domains like CloudFront work correctly.

https://github.com/alyandon/requestpolicy/commits/release-0....

Caveats are:

1) I have absolutely no intentions of continuing any work on my hack. The changes I made meet my needs. Feel free to fork if you need additional features.

2) I don't pretend to be an elite javascript developer. I have no idea if my hacks are considered idiomatic javascript or not. I also make no promises that running my hacked version of this extension won't upload all your private data to a server in Russia or cause other problems like having your hard drive explode in a ball of fire.

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

#194

Post by SixSigma »

rjaco31 wrote: post #45
mixedbit wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A drawback is that a proxy won't be able to filter HTTPS traffic.

uh? you can totally filter HTTPS with a proxy, especially with a local one. Either use the option to activate the dump of you keys on disk (a one-liner on every browser) and point the proxy to that file, or just break the SSL in 2 and rely on the proxy for the actual cert check.

"privoxy" not "a proxy"

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

#195

Post by r12e »

vfclists wrote: post #142
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…

Having all my keystrokes sent to Google is the main reason why I don't use Chrome. Can this app guard against it, ie only send my keystrokes to Google only when I enter a Google URL?

Have you tried using Chromium[1] instead? Once I got serious with ABP/KISS Privacy/Ghostery I figured it made sense to switch from Chrome to Chromium.

And discovering Chromium-Updater the other day has plugged the only missing piece in the jigsaw, for me.

[1]http://chromium.woolyss.com/ [2]https://github.com/benbristow/Chromium-Updater/releases

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

#197

Post by sequoia »

gorhill wrote: post #154
NDizzle wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to try your plugin, but by default I can't load: gmail, aws cloud services panel, and another cloud provider's configuration panel. Maybe I don't know how to use it, but what are you trying to accomplish by preventing me from loading mail.google.com by default?!

You can set it up anywhere between blocking everything to blocking nothing. I do have a couple of set up files to help people get started, here: https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/tree/master/stuff By default though it comes in block-all/allow-exceptionally mode, just like NoScript and RequestPolicy. Eventually, as usual, as time permit, I would like to have a wizard for first install which will let the user…

Please post to HN when you have some sensible default config options built in! I really want to try your tool but can't be arsed to whitelist everything one by one.

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

#198

Post by Silhouette »

dfc wrote: post #188
Silhouette wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it only assumes that you don't gain a positive net benefit from a networking effect in a network where people use ad blockers and then get upset and storm off your site if you do something about it . In the absence of data to the contrary, that doesn't seem like an unreasonable assumption.

"Network effect" not "networking effect": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

Unless you're building something like a social network or marketplace site, that specific kind of network effect seems unlikely to matter very much.

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

#199

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#200

Post by [deleted] »

nirvdrum wrote: post #176
diegocg wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cir…

[deleted]
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