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I use the program Ad Muncher for Windows, and I've found that it sometimes becomes a humongous bandwidth hog, when I'm watching video. So it's not just memory that can be at risk of hogging.
The first thing people complain about with browsers is probably memory usage. I doubt that many people actually understand what a browser actually does with that memory. I sure don't. 100mb sounds like a lot of memory for a webpage. Where does all this memory go to?
Great question. Does that encompass the assets on the page? The recent cache, lookahead? I'm always staggered on the flip side that serving a web page using something like XYZ CMS can use a staggering 50MB or more for one page load without caching. Bizarre when you consider that you could get a small encyclopedias worth of text on a floppy disk. Too many websites are drowning polar bears...
Wouldn't the solution involve allowing plugins to manipulate the content of a page before it is parsed by the browser? There used to be a proxy adblocker that did that, but I don't think it works anymore. The Kindle browser uses a proxy to pre-render pages on the server in order to lighten the load of the device. Could AaaS (Adblock as a service) be a viable business? I think I'd pay for it.
It probably could, however I'm sure it would be shut down quickly by advertisers and parties showing ads - after all, you're offering a service to remove their source of income. Unless you'd funnel part of your subscriber's income back to the advertisers, based on whose ads you block. But I'm sure it'd end up being too expensive for the consumer and too much of a hassle for the one offering the service.
Not to mention you'd force your users to funnel all of their internet traffic through your servers, and it wouldn't work with encrypted pages (which large parts of the internet is moving towards)
I would recommend Privoxy rather than adblock. I chose it because it can be used with any browser rather than needing to be a plugin and have had great results with it. As a bonus I have it running on a virtual server and use an ssh tunnel on any system I end up using. This gets me round filters and installing things other than ssh. So if I am using my Android phone on free wifi, I know I'm not being dns hijacked or…
The first thing people complain about with browsers is probably memory usage. I doubt that many people actually understand what a browser actually does with that memory. I sure don't. 100mb sounds like a lot of memory for a webpage. Where does all this memory go to?
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 engine every single time you go to a site thus monetizing ad views. Typosquatters. "Journalism" sites with one line of the article per page of spam. Spam "answer" websites.
Memory is way, way down the list.
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…
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.
The first thing people complain about with browsers is probably memory usage. I doubt that many people actually understand what a browser actually does with that memory. I sure don't. 100mb sounds like a lot of memory for a webpage. Where does all this memory go to?
The most popular websites run quite amazing amounts of code, and JavaScript execution is usually the dominant consumer of memory.
If you want a deeper understanding, visit about:memory in Firefox you'll get a detailed breakdown of how memory is used.
The first thing people complain about with browsers is probably memory usage. I doubt that many people actually understand what a browser actually does with that memory. I sure don't. 100mb sounds like a lot of memory for a webpage. Where does all this memory go to?
It boils down to images, if you think about it a PNG file is small but when you decompress that to a native bitmap for rendering to a screen, you've suddenly consumed a lot of space. A lot of applications render using the CPU and pass the data to the GPU to display.
Now look at a typical page with images, flash (with images inside) all of the scroll and developers that don't optimise their images and then 100MB of data for a single page isn't really a lot.
Plus memory usage is the wrong metric, I don't really care how much RAM my applications use, I care about how responsive they are. Firefox can use all my RAM if I get great page load times and my other applications don't suffer.