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Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs

extremetech.com

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Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs

#191

Post by personZ »

njloof wrote: post #119
MicroBerto wrote: post #20

People aren't using Adblock to conserve resources. They're using it to block ads and most are willing to take a performance hit to do so.

That's not why I started using Adblock. I started because the web became unusable on an older machine (5 years). The content wasn't any more sophisticated but it soaked up all the resources (CPU, RAM etc.) available. Imagine if you had a PDF reader that ran at 100% CPU and swapped all the time!

Indeed, the post you replied to is not based in actual reality. The entire foundation of the adblock industry was an aggressive attention-war plied by the ad business, where soon webpages were an armed conflict of aggressive ads each imposing even more of a tax.

No one expected the cure to be worse than the disease. I couldn't believe it somewhat recently when I had to use an older laptop to find that simply running Chrome was completely untenable if ABP was installed.

Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs

#192

Post by gorhill »

snird wrote: post #60

I'm using Ghostery as a privacy and ad-blocking extension. Does anyone have data on the impact Ghostery might have on the browser memory usage?

Ghostery/Disconnect are leaner memory-wise than uBlock [1]. That is for their own memory footprint. I do not know how much they contribute memory overhead to web pages though, but I suspect not much. I have never benchmarked Ghostery/Disconnect CPU-wise.

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Own-memory-usage:-ben...

Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs

#193

Post by datasage »

currysausage wrote: post #86

My current favorite solution for blocking the more annoying ads and increasing security while preserving a low-latency browsing experience: Click-to-play for Flash Player (and all the other plug-ins). There are lots of gray boxes now all over the web, but I prefer them over resource-hungry attention-grabbing Flash ads.

I switched to this as well. I was running into problems with pages refreshing flash video ads causing memory to leak quite badly if a page was open too long. Once i switched flash to click to play, the problem went away.

Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs

#194

Post by benbristow »

nandhp wrote: post #141
zo1 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got tricked once by one of those while on Sourceforge. Words can not describe how annoyed I was that day.

And if you try to download Windows binaries from Sourceforge, your download may be enhanced with WinZip, the Ask.com toolbar, and other optional offers. http://www.ghacks.net/2013/07/17/sourceforges-new-installer-...

This is a nice little app recently developed that can help you out with those 'installers'.

http://unchecky.com/

Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs

#195

Post by cozuya »

alopecoid wrote: post #176
cozuya wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Effectively you're asking for all document.createElement calls to be blocked. Those are used for all sorts of things that aren't ads or popups. Blocking that would probably cause a very large percent of pages to be completely broken.

So there's no explicit way to distinguish between "new window" calls from other types of calls? I'm kind of shocked that, with all the effort that's been put into browsers in recent years, that the ability to "create a new window" hasn't been removed entirely from the API without explicit user consent. Again, I can't think of a single site that uses this feature legitimately.

If you're talking about actual new windows that are a separate process, those have been blocked by popup blockers for years. As far as popovers that block the screen/annoy you, those are just HTML elements that are positioned on top of normal content - its not a "special" thing backed into the DOM API. There's really no effective way to stop a page from being able to do that unless you disable javascript entirely.

Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs

#197

Post by jamiek88 »

atoponce wrote: post #131
aroch wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's literally a rehash of the FUD in your parent post.

There's no uncertainty or doubt about it. Ghostrank reports back about how it has disabled tracking in your browser. It may be "anonymous", but Ghostrank tracks your web usage, and sells it to advertisers. http://lifehacker.com/ad-blocking-extension-ghostery-actuall... http://www.informationweek.com/software/social/ghostery-make... https://gigaom.com/2014/11/19/ghostery-uses-plugin-data-to-p... Ghostrank tracks you.…

On an opt-in basis.

You don't have to opt in.

You are not bugged to opt in.

Plain and simple.

Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs

#199

Post by nitrogen »

benbristow wrote: post #194
nandhp wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you try to download Windows binaries from Sourceforge, your download may be enhanced with WinZip, the Ask.com toolbar, and other optional offers. http://www.ghacks.net/2013/07/17/sourceforges-new-installer-...

This is a nice little app recently developed that can help you out with those 'installers'. http://unchecky.com/

In many cases it's not the program authors that added those installers, but SourceForge and/or its mirrors.

Re: Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs

#200

Post by atoponce »

jamiek88 wrote: post #197
atoponce wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no uncertainty or doubt about it. Ghostrank reports back about how it has disabled tracking in your browser. It may be "anonymous", but Ghostrank tracks your web usage, and sells it to advertisers. http://lifehacker.com/ad-blocking-extension-ghostery-actuall... http://www.informationweek.com/software/social/ghostery-make... https://gigaom.com/2014/11/19/ghostery-uses-plugin-data-to-p... Ghostrank tracks you.…

On an opt-in basis. You don't have to opt in. You are not bugged to opt in. Plain and simple.

I already mentioned that it's opt-in, and disabled by default.
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