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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

#211

Post by sphink »

01Michael10 wrote: post #105
icebraining wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it; I'm on FF 29 without that addon, and I have a star button on the bar (not in the address text input, but on the same bar). What's the point of the addon?

The point is the star button is not in a convenient location in FF 29... I find have to search for the star button now when need to bookmark something. I guess it made to much sense to have right in the address bar so they moved it... The Classic Theme Restorer may be in my near future. UPDATE: I used the Customize feature to move the star button just to the right of the address bar and that is good enough for me.

What's the use of an uncategorized bookmark? I always drag the url into a bookmark folder in the toolbar (which I always have open; apparently come people hate that.) For uncategorized stuff, well, I guess that's why I have 300+ tabs open right now...

And Tree Style Tabs. Cannot live anymore without TST. That really ought to be in the core. Especially since it's sometimes a little buggy, though that may be because FF is changing underneath it.

Oddly, I'm on Nightly, and the star button is to the right of my url bar. I don't remember moving it back there, and I don't know why I would, since I never use it.

Ok, it's gone now.

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

#212

Post by nnethercote »

clarry wrote: post #146
iopq wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have 16 gigs of RAM. I'd love to see every program use as much RAM usefully as possible. I don't want programs to write temp files to the drive. I want things to be done in RAM as much as possible to avoid wearing out the SSD. In fact, every application DOES behave like it owns all of the RAM on the machine. This is what virtual address space does, it's pretending that each program has access to any place in the me…

I have 1 gig of RAM. I'd love to see every program not waste tens or hundreds of megabytes not doing anything useful with it. I don't want programs to cause heavy swapping and slowdowns, I don't want them to crash because they ran out of memory. I want things to be done reasonably efficiently to allow me to do more with the amazing computing power I did not have fifteen years ago, with a better UX. Sadly, a lot of cu…

This discussion sums up one of the great challenges for browser vendors -- satisfying users with wildly different hardware.

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

#213

Post by nnethercote »

linux_devil wrote: post #182

I switched from Firefox to Safari , when I found out 900 Mb used by firefox on my machine , now I know the real reason behind that .

That's a surprising story from a user named "linux_devil"!

Maybe it's time to try switching back?

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

#214

Post by pbhjpbhj »

__david__ wrote: post #205
DenisM wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we can block ads in mainstream browsers because ad providers will just work around the blocks. Plugins provide defense in numbers against suck workarounds, making ad blocks actually effective.

This doesn't make sense to me. Why can't ad providers work around the blocks in adblock? And why could they work around those same blocks if they happened to be integrated into the browser itself? Take popup blocking as an example. That's integrated into the browser and has almost completely eliminated the annoying popup ad.

>Why can't ad providers work around the blocks in adblock? //

It's not really a work around but some sites do block your [full] access and say to turn off your adblocker if you want access to the [additional] content.

That said I don't think it makes much difference to the matter at hand.

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

#215

Post by nnethercote »

mwexler wrote: post #168

Ah, 3 words that always seem to show up together: firefox and memory and usage. I look forward to when I see that 4th word, "minimal", in there as well. Yes, I know original post is about an addin increasing memory usage, but I guess that doesn't surprise me anymore either, sadly, when thinking of firefox. Even with the memory pain, I still (mostly) love FF.

It's much better than it used to be. For example, Firefox 15 made a class of very common leaks caused by add-ons impossible. Firefox 26 massively reduced the amount of memory used on image-heavy pages. And there have been many smaller improvements over the past three years, under the aegis of the MemShrink project (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink).

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

#216

Post by nnethercote »

SudoNick wrote: post #153

I think this is the fourth or fifth time, in recent memory, that I've seen someone from Mozilla criticize Adblock Plus and call on its developers to make changes. ABP startup time and memory consumption were subjects I recall, and its general impact on page load times may have been as well. I can understand Mozilla taking some interest in how addons behave, and constructive feedback on extensions is a good thing. How…

I'm the author of the post. I was extremely careful to keep the tone of the post neutral. This paragraph sums it up:

> So, it’s clear that ABP greatly increases Firefox’s memory usage. Now, this isn’t all bad. Many people (including me!) will be happy with this trade-off — they will gladly use extra memory in order to block ads. But if you’re using a low-end machine without much memory, you might have different priorities.

If you think this post is unreasonable, I think your skin is too thin.

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

#217

Post by math0ne »

dcc1 wrote: post #9

http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero/

I like this as well, even works great for windows 8 IE which there is no ad block for otherwise, but sometime I need to see ads and then switching is not worth the hassle. I've been thinking of developing a system tray hosts file switcher for this purpose. You think anyone else would use it?

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

#218

Post by Steuard »

mullingitover wrote: post #189

This is like a commercial for forking Firefox to build highly efficient ad blocking into the browser. It's sad that the most-demanded feature on every browser, as evidenced by plugin downloads, is ad blocking. However, all the major browsers are produced by companies with their hands in advertising, and this conflict of interest has resulted in this feature request going unfulfilled for a over a decade. Fork 'em.

What business model do you envision for the web, then? Sure, my own websites are ad-free, but they're purely hobby projects and I don't feel like the (small?) income would be worth the personal discomfort of "selling out". For those who can't afford to develop and host good content for free, what's the solution?

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

#219

Post by spyder »

walls wrote: post #115
barrkel wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of my adblock stuff is CSS based. I use element hiding helper to figure out which bits to kill. I have hundreds of these custom rules.

To be pedantic: That's not blocking, it's just hiding. They have vastly different implications.

To be pedantic: It's blocking from displaying it but not from the downloading.

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

#220

Post by varkson »

mullingitover wrote: post #189

This is like a commercial for forking Firefox to build highly efficient ad blocking into the browser. It's sad that the most-demanded feature on every browser, as evidenced by plugin downloads, is ad blocking. However, all the major browsers are produced by companies with their hands in advertising, and this conflict of interest has resulted in this feature request going unfulfilled for a over a decade. Fork 'em.

IE contains a general purpose blocker. You just download an ad list from the Add Ons site and it does it all in browser.
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