Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AdBlock Plus’s effect on Firefox’s memory usage

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 270 posts

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

#91

Post by rane »

gorhill wrote: post #20

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…

Just installed the extension and it seems great. Particularly like the matrix UI for allowing/blocking things.

However, I definitely don't want to micromanage things like accepting scripts and cookies for certain sites I use. Is there a way to make it work essentially the same way as AdBlock does? Tried to look in the wiki but didn't find anything.

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

#93

Post by nitrogen »

userbinator wrote: post #85
mp3geek wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 domain…

ABP is filtering content that's already been retrieved over the network and read into the browser. With hosts, the blocked content never makes it into my machine, which saves bandwidth. I think using both is better than either one alone. A hosts file to quickly remove most of the unwanted stuff, and ABP to finish off the rest that does get through.

Are you sure that the requests are still made?

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

#94

Post by losvedir »

gorhill wrote: post #20

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've been using HTTPSB since the last time you answered a few questions for me on HN (about a week ago?) and I must say: stunning work!

A quick question: is there a keyboard shortcut I'm missing to enable/disable the request blocking? For the time being I do Cmd+L, Cmd+C, Cmd+Shift+N, Cmd+V to copy the URL into a private browsing window, but it'd be nice to just temporarily enable full functionality on the page, and then disable when I'm done.

Also, for those using the extension: there's a built-in set of rules to enable browsing Google sites: search, gmail, etc. that you can enable by clicking the puzzle piece in the HTTPSB menu. Very helpful.

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

#95

Post by davidgerard »

axx wrote: post #92

It's 2014. My computer has 12 Gigabytes of RAM. I don't give a shit, as long as i don't have to view those terrible stupid Ads. Advertisers, fix your practises and i will view your Ads again.

Firefox with ABP is why my laptop now has 8GB instead of 4GB.

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

#96

Post by frozenport »

axx wrote: post #92

It's 2014. My computer has 12 Gigabytes of RAM. I don't give a shit, as long as i don't have to view those terrible stupid Ads. Advertisers, fix your practises and i will view your Ads again.

Its about the latency silly! The vim example allocates 2 GB which takes a few seconds, which we know makes users leave our sites. Going through those GBs slows everything down!

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

#97

Post by hollerith »

nnethercote wrote: post #28
neals wrote: post #3

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?

Many people think of a browser as a tool for displaying text and pictures, with maybe a bit of JS code and some CSS effects on the side. That was true in the late 90s, but these days a browser is actually a fully-fledged programming environment that also happens to have some incredibly sophisticated multimedia capabilities: text, images, video, audio, animations, 3d graphics, etc. The most popular websites run quite…

>That was true in the late 90s, but these days a browser is actually a fully-fledged programming environment

Yes, I know, and I don't like it.

It makes it more complicated and unreliable to use the web to view text and images.

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

#98

Post by arikrak »

nfoz wrote: post #89
nnethercote wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people think of a browser as a tool for displaying text and pictures, with maybe a bit of JS code and some CSS effects on the side. That was true in the late 90s, but these days a browser is actually a fully-fledged programming environment that also happens to have some incredibly sophisticated multimedia capabilities: text, images, video, audio, animations, 3d graphics, etc. The most popular websites run quite…

> That was true in the late 90s, but these days a browser is actually a fully-fledged programming environment that also happens to have some incredibly sophisticated multimedia capabilities: text, images, video, audio, animations, 3d graphics, etc. Maybe I just miss the 90s, but I would much rather have the simple content browser than a "full-fledged programming environment", especially since all of that content is c…

You can disable javascript or anything else in browsers, but you won't have a good experience on the web.

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

#99

Post by ionforce »

nfoz wrote: post #89
nnethercote wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people think of a browser as a tool for displaying text and pictures, with maybe a bit of JS code and some CSS effects on the side. That was true in the late 90s, but these days a browser is actually a fully-fledged programming environment that also happens to have some incredibly sophisticated multimedia capabilities: text, images, video, audio, animations, 3d graphics, etc. The most popular websites run quite…

> That was true in the late 90s, but these days a browser is actually a fully-fledged programming environment that also happens to have some incredibly sophisticated multimedia capabilities: text, images, video, audio, animations, 3d graphics, etc. Maybe I just miss the 90s, but I would much rather have the simple content browser than a "full-fledged programming environment", especially since all of that content is c…

Define "modern BS".

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

#100

Post by walden42 »

maaaats wrote: post #31

> Many people (including me!) will be happy with this trade-off — they will gladly use extra memory in order to block ads. Well, for me the whole point of blocking ads is because they are often big flash things that hog cpu and memory. If ABP is no better, then most of the reason is gone. I'd actually like to view ads to support more sites.

The one thing I miss from Chrome is the Adblock extension. It has a feature that allows ads on all sites except the ones you explicitly block--a reverse adblock filter, so to speak. I'm ok with seeing ads, but if there's a site I often visit that bothers me (I'm looking at you, weather.com), then I'll block it.

Unfortunately the Firefox version doesn't have this, and neither do the alternative adblock addons I could find.

Post reply on HN