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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

#71

Post by bru »

TarpitCarnivore wrote: post #54
bru wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched from ABP to this hosts file a few months ago and I have zero regret. My browser's faster, lighter and ads are blocked just as well as with ABP. I actually even started splitting my hosts file: the layout is /etc/hosts ('compiled' version) /etc/hosts.d/ /etc/hosts.d/aaa-warning (warning reminding me to run `update-hosts` instead of modifying /etc/hosts. Appears atop the compiled file) /etc/hosts.d/adblock (…

Have you been able to block stuff like Tynt, and other copy/paste triggered JS stuff?

I was not aware of Tynt, but I believe it's well blocked.

I just looked at the adblock-hosts file, and 'tynt' appears several times. One of those lines is commented with a link to an article about tynt[0]. I tried copy-pasting from The New Yorker and TechCrunch (who, as claimed by the author of the article, use tynt), and both times there was no crap appended.

0: http://daringfireball.net/2010/05/tynt_copy_paste_jerks

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

#72

Post by probably_wrong »

bithush wrote: post #11

My primary computer is a laptop from 2008 with a 2.5Ghz Core 2 Duo and other than a 1 second delay in startup I don't notice any performance degradation in general use compared to running without ABP. Currently this machine has been up for 3 days and 17 hours and Firefox has been running the whole time and it is using 303MB with 4 tabs open one of which is the Daily Mail (don't judge!) which is an extremely busy page…

> I only have 4GB RAM

I've also seen this in some other comment, so I think it's worth pointing out: if you have a desktop computer then yes, it's ok. However, there are also netbooks and notebooks around with a lot less memory than that. Tablets, while not currently one of Firefox markets, are also commonly seen with less than that. Lots of parents with second-hand computers, too, which haven't been touched in a while because it "just works".

The overall attitude towards hardware is apparently "use it for two years, then throw away and get a new one", and yet underpowered computers surround me in a 5:1 ratio. I sometimes have to install plain old versions of software (Office '97 comes to mind) because the new ones provide 5% new features at the cost of half your memory.

Maybe everyone else has techie friends that only care about the latest and shiniest, or maybe the rest of the world is rich enough to throw away perfectly good hardware just because they feel like it. But from my experience (as biased as it is), 4Gb is not an "only" situation.

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

#73

Post by gcp »

spain wrote: post #51

Another (related) popular extension that I've noticed negatively affecting Firefox's performance is HTTPS Everywhere.

HTTPS Everywhere is mostly annoying because it stops random sites from working, and people generally forget to check that it's HTTPS Everywhere that's causing it.

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

#75

Post by Omniusaspirer »

Silhouette wrote: post #57
artursapek wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, not sure slowing down your own site for a reason unknown to most visitors is going to help your bottom line.

At the risk of stating the obvious, if your site is ad-funded then annoying users who don't see your ads so they go away and don't come back is a win. If they bitch about it to their friends who also wouldn't see your ads and those friends don't visit in the first place, it is an even bigger win.

I'm not so sure this is "obvious". It presumes that those people will never refer anyone who would watch your ads, and also that search engines won't down rank you in results based on the number of people bailing from your site instantly/avoiding clicking on it.

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

#76

Post by mp3geek »

dcc1 wrote: post #9

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

Host files are very limited, and when you start dealing with anti-adblock scripts and other css/js scripts on some sites it falls apart. Basically hosts file was great 10+ years ago when the Web was new(ish) and Adblock was only used by a few. Now we're dealing with CSS, objects, subrequests, first party ad/tracking scripts.

With all the features Adblock Plus gives us, far far more than just blocking xx and yy domains like in a hosts file... Why not just use the extension? Let's leave the host file to the history books.

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

#77

Post by Curmudgel »

mschuster91 wrote: post #48
VLM wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The first thing people complain about with browsers is ..." 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 en…

> They make is as hard as humanly possible to use bookmarks Chrome has a "star" button right in the address bar, FF and IE have Ctrl+B to create a bookmark. And both Chrome and FF have a pretty good auto-complete in the address bar (I just have to type "ne" to get Hacker News, "ma" for google mail, "youp" and "yout" for video streams, etc pp). People vastly underestimate the power of keyboard shortcuts. I work as a f…

> Chrome has a "star" button right in the address bar, FF and IE have Ctrl+B to create a bookmark.

The Classic Theme Restorer add-on for FF allows you restore the star button to the address bar. On FF, Ctrl-D bookmarks the current page, while Ctrl-B opens a list of bookmarks.

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

#80

Post by userbinator »

Omniusaspirer wrote: post #67
nextw33k wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once read an explanation of memory usage. 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'…

It's pretty rare that I want an application to use less ram these days, if anything I wish more programs would take full advantage of it.

Firefox can use all my RAM if I get great page load times and my other applications don't suffer.

if anything I wish more programs would take full advantage of it.

If every single application behaved like it owned all the memory on your machine, you would have a pretty horrible experience as they'll be basically fighting over what's available and likely hitting the swapfile. On the contrary, I do wish developers would care more about the memory footprint of their applications since they are sharing with all the others. Looking at it this way, optimising performance by using more memory aggressively (and thus reducing the amount of memory other applications can use) seems like a horribly greedy and antisocial way to behave, and thus it makes sense to use as little as feasible to give good performance.

(I'm assuming that the use case here is a browser that you have open along with other applications; if you only have a browser running, then it doesn't matter as much.)

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