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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

#401

Post by CurtMonash »

SwellJoe wrote: post #266

I use AdBlock Plus not because I don't want to see ads...I actually don't mind ads. I use it because I don't want auto-starting audio, ever . I have 30-60 tabs up at any given time. When an ad starts playing audio, it disrupts my entire workflow, possibly disturbs my partner sleeping next to me, etc. In short, auto-start audio in ads is quite simply so far outside of what I consider acceptable behavior, that I'm will…

I basically agree, in that I disable auto-starting audio at all costs.

Truth be told, I don't bother going back and whitelisting sites that may be OK.

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

#402

Post by klibertp »

brandon272 wrote: post #267
SwellJoe wrote: post #266

I use AdBlock Plus not because I don't want to see ads...I actually don't mind ads. I use it because I don't want auto-starting audio, ever . I have 30-60 tabs up at any given time. When an ad starts playing audio, it disrupts my entire workflow, possibly disturbs my partner sleeping next to me, etc. In short, auto-start audio in ads is quite simply so far outside of what I consider acceptable behavior, that I'm will…

This is why I usually have my audio muted.

This works very well outside of a browser, too. For example various beeps from Window Manager or terminal emulator or particular programs can be very irritating and disabling them all means going through endless pile of different "settings" dialogs.

It breaks down, however, when you want to listen to some music while working. In the end I have my audio muted most of the time, but over time I had to go through all those settings anyway.

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

#403

Post by ta0967 »

atoponce wrote: post #200
jamiek88 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

then why the campaign to scare people away from ghostery?

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

#404

Post by awalton »

tracker1 wrote: post #359
awalton wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is mainly due to having many images on your website (memory can store uncompressed images to save CPU cycles when rendering) If your webpage has that many images, you need to redesign your webpage. An uncompressed image at my screen resolution is 21MB - your webpage needs ten times that in memory? For maybe 500 words of prose and some meme/cat picture? Modern web design is just so bad that they can't help them…

Well, considering I work at a car classifieds site, and there are usually about 20 photos that may be on any given page, and in the new search boxes will be even bigger, and with retina screens wanting 2x images, I'd say yes.. there are sites that really need that much space for images. Not that all or most do.. but there are a lot of really nice sites that use a lot of large images for full content display. Other te…

Well considering you're an outlier, I probably shouldn't waste my time replying, but because you felt the need, I will reciprocate.

The average web page is what we're talking about here. Even your page which is demonstrably unaverage should not be hundreds and hundreds of megabytes of raw images.

Images are crucial, but running a car classified site, you should know how to properly demand load images and not just have the page load every image unscaled as soon as you hit the page. Thumbnailing was properly figured out in the 1990s, we've only added fanciness to it over the intervening decades. And even at "retina" sizes, thumbnails are a pittance in the memory budget for a webpage - if you went nuts and had 640x480 "retina thumbnails" for 20 cars, that's still only 24.6MB uncompressed. Feel free to rerun the math with your own numbers on your own time.

Since it needs repeating, we're talking about the average webpage coming in at 200MB. Give yourself some logos and a few other UI images and you're still talking nowhere near 50MB of decompressed images on the page. Yet, that's only a quarter of the page's size in memory. Somehow the DOM, Javascript engine, iframes and UI element layout are costing the other 150MB. And that's where I call bullshit. That's how nasty and tangled and batshit insane modern web design has become.

And we're not discussing video here at all, since video is probably one of most insane things about the modern web: either you're forced to use Flash which is basically like running an entire second browser rendering engine inside of your browser, just to download, decode, and play some video, or you're lucky and can use HTML5 at which point the overhead beyond audio/video decompression buffers (which people will be doing in Javascript soon enough, yay!), the setup for the OS's multimedia engine, and a small bit of DOM is inconsequential in comparison to the video stream itself. This makes the amount of space video takes on the client at best unpredictable and at worst, terrible to think about.

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

#405

Post by boyaka »

boyaka wrote: post #297
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.

This is just not true (your first claim that is, I would say people use it for multiple reasons). Adblock can certainly conserve resources in some cases. I know one webpage that loads 2-3 very resource-intensive banner ads every 30 seconds or so. I've seen websites that do a lot worse too.

I would just like to say I have never been a major user of Adblock. There are two reasons I have always been okay without it:

1. I feel somewhat bad about using a free service and preventing them from getting ad revenue

2. I'm really good at ignoring advertising of all kinds. People might say it still works subliminally or it has an effect on me and I just don't notice it, but I seriously don't believe this is true. With TV I used to mute it, change the channel, or do something else on my computer (I don't watch TV anymore, but I do admit I pay attention to ads if I join somebody else that watches it). With video ads on the internet I mute the audio and do something else on my computer. I basically have never intentionally clicked a banner ad, besides maybe some Facebook ads only because they seem to have access to my Amazon search history and show me items I'm already shopping for. Facebook is certainly a different beast in terms of advertising because it involves showing businesses that friends have liked, but I wouldn't say this has a very positive effect on my opinion about that business.

That said, I used Adblock many years ago around when it first came out to block YouTube ads but switched over to my muting/ignoring method because it did affect my conscience negatively, not so much because of YouTube/Google but because of other content I browsed on the web.

My setup recently has been to have Adblock installed on Firefox (I have always primarily used Chrome) for the instances where ads on a website are causing performance/experience issues. I have had Adblock installed (disabled) on Chrome because I have a Chromebook and have occasionally enabled it in order to visit the problem website on it (it is pretty much unusable on this Atom processor without Adblock). In the past several months I have noticed some very weird bad performance issues if I leave it enabled and use YouTube (maybe some other websites), not sure if this is due to changes in Adblock or if YouTube is intentionally breaking itself when it detects Adblock usage.

P.S. I'm not sure if any of this has anything to do with my previous post being downvoted, but I felt compelled to explain my reasons for using Adblock.

P.P.S. The website I am primarily talking about that has become nearly unusable and quite unstable due to ads is tinychat.com... My reasons for being okay with blocking them for this website are complicated and I'd rather not go into detail.

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

#406

Post by tim333 »

jordanpg wrote: post #350
naner wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I use it (and I assume most people use it) because I don't want to see ads. Advertising on the web is largely just obnoxious, ugly, and crude. Also the relentless tracking is a little creepy, so there is another small benefit to using an ad blocker. I know there are some small groups trying to do good advertising on the web but it is so insignificant it doesn't even register. Large and important websites don't c…

Glad to see this point of view represented. I have never found the indignant reaction to the use of ad blockers very believable. Advertising is predicated on lies, by definition, and I am only interested in making consumer decisions as far from the influence of marketing departments as is practicable. Advertising is the very worst that capitalism has to offer. Moreover, I am not interested in being distracted by ads,…

>Advertising is predicated on lies, by definition

Well not really. You can for instance have a genuinely good deal and just let people be aware of that. Though lying does happen of course.

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

#407

Post by GhotiFish »

juliangregorian wrote: post #329
GhotiFish wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is actually very easy to solve. When someone wants to run an ad on your ad network. The vetting process should be more than "how much money you got?" If not for their own sakes anyway. Ad block needs to continue to run rampant over this "internet economy" because advertisers need to come to terms with the fact that now a days users get to choose what they see and how they see it. Maybe one day it will occur to someon…

It's not easy, because there isn't really much of a vetting process on most ad networks; everything possible is automated. You may not mind seeing that industry die, but until you start paying for visiting websites, you'll have to amend that to say "I don't mind seeing the internet die".

"The internet die" huh.

I think you'll find in the absence of one solution, another presents itself.

As an example, github is not an ad based service, nor is it some sorta bait and switch. It's terms are reasonable and is generally useful to everyone.

That is ridiculously dramatic to say "The internet will die"

It's just the shitty part that will die.

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

#408

Post by wutbrodo »

fwn wrote: post #288
wutbrodo wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I've never understood about the people claiming that "they have no choice" or that they feel morally justified in denying revenue to authors and other content creators. I don't use ABP, but it's really not that much effort to have to see bad ads on each "bad" domain _once_, and then blacklist and not have to deal with that entire domain and their bad ads ever again. I do something quite similar with a JS…

> "feel morally justified in denying revenue to authors and other content creators" I do think that only a very small portion of adblocking users wants to "justify" anything in this regard. Most just don't want to see ads and skip the faulty and economically biased moral debate around it. edit: While I agree that the blacklisting solution shouldn't be too much work, the charming "setup and forget" experience most adb…

> I do think that only a very small portion of adblocking users wants to "justify" anything in this regard. Most just don't want to see ads and skip the faulty and economically biased moral debate around it.

This is possibly true, but not particularly relevant, as my comment mentions that I'm talking specifically about those who _do_ engage in moral justification. Among the people with whom I've talked about it, those who claim a moral justification are far more common than those who simply say "I don't like ads and I don't care about creators not getting paid". I would be surprised if there weren't many HNers whose sample is similar to mine.

Tangentially but not importantly, I'm not convinced that only a small portion of users openly think "yes I'm consuming a product without paying and I have no other justification other than 'i dont want to pay' ". Part of the reason you see such contortions in an attempt at moral justification is because one can draw a pretty clear parallel to "I would shoplift if I didn't think I'd get caught", with the only (somewhat dubious) distinction being differences in marginal cost.

Note that I have talked to people who have a moral stance on adblocking and piracy that _is_ consistent, but this is rare since it's usually accompanied by a pretty radical stance along the lines of "all information (music, art, writing, etc) should be completely free", which requires a pretty massive amount of philosophical baggage in terms of having a sense of how this affects the incentive to create said information.

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

#409

Post by MicroBerto »

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!

In general, anyone who is on Hacker Newa is not who I'm referring to when I say "people". 99% care about not seeing ads.

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

#410

Post by dannypgh »

justinhj wrote: post #182
dannypgh wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This provides an engineering anecdote that adblocking is worth more than half a gig to a large fraction of the population" That's a reasonable conclusion only if people are aware that they're making the trade, which I suspect most users are not (otherwise this article would be rather boring)

I would suspect that most people don't come close to using all the ram in their computer in normal use. Whether they use adblock or not will not have any noticeable affect on the computer performance apart from the blocking of ads.

Not sure I agree with this. I tend to use way too many tabs, and therefore use up my memory. I was visiting my parents recently, and on their Mac they were leaving a lot of programs running (having closed the window but not exiting the program).

I think low-memory situations are the most likely explanation for slowdowns experienced by typical home or office users.

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