
Adblock Plus is probably the reason Firefox and Chrome are such memory hogs - lelf
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/182428-ironic-iframes-adblock-plus-is-probably-the-reason-firefox-and-chrome-are-such-memory-hogs
======
shpx
People are using µBlock now for precisely this reason.

[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/%C2%B5Block-
vs.-ABP:-...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/%C2%B5Block-
vs.-ABP:-efficiency-compared)

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/%C2%B5block/cjpalh...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/%C2%B5block/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm?hl=en)
[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock)

~~~
elvis635
Together with umatrix
([https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/](https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/))
are the best chrome extensions

Since I went back to firefox those are the only extensions I really miss,
there is policeman
([https://github.com/futpib/policeman/](https://github.com/futpib/policeman/))
but it's not as good as them yet

To whoever develop extensions, please don't focus only on chrome, firefox
during the last months has become must better that it was before, if
developers only consider chrome, people will eventually migrate to it and
firefox will die. Even though chromium is open it won't be good for the
ecosystem

~~~
Nexxxeh
As my paranoia ramps up year on year, I now use Opera with µBlock. For me, it
has the polish of Chrome with some nice extras, but without the increasingly
creepy Googality. It works fine, although I've not tried µMatrix. (I have my
defaults changed to DuckDuckGo. Usually connecting via a VPN.)

I've whitelisted a few sites I like to support (a couple of webcomics, HaD
etc).

I have a lot of filters: "62,501 network filters ＋ 40,728 cosmetic filters".

Opera's task manager says the extension is taking up a mere 32MB. Probably not
accurate, but a lot better AdBlock (my previous favourite).

Off-topic but I wish people would stop using Mu for project names. Where is
the Mu key on the keyboard? I have to copy and paste or alt-code it. Call the
project microBlock or something! They use "u" instead of "µ" on Github, so why
not just use something else entirely?

µTorrent was the one that really irritated me because I couldn't type "utorr"
to search for it on my start menu.

I'd say something to gorhill (albeit far more politely), but it seems childish
and ungrateful. He's clearly poured so much time and effort into making such
useful software. "Great software but the name is fucking annoying, mate!"

~~~
xenophonf
[http://www.howtotype.net/symbol/Micro/](http://www.howtotype.net/symbol/Micro/)

Sadly, the US-International keyboard on Windows does not implement a shortcut
for the "micro" character
([http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306560](http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306560)).

~~~
stinos
There's always character map which has this and like _all_ others you can ever
think of. A bit cumbersome, but at least one doesn't have to remember
character codes and can search for characters by name.

~~~
seanp2k2
"Let me google that" _pulls out character map_ pretty poor UX if you ask me.
Almost as bad for search ability as calling your product "go" or "cloud" or
"driver" or any other one-word generic, hard to find even with contextual
terms around it.

~~~
stinos
_pretty poor UX if you ask me_

yup. Has been around since NT or maybe even longer..

~~~
raverbashing
the poor UX is not the Character Map

It is having to open it every time you want to type the name of µSomething

~~~
Dylan16807
The poor UX is the keyboard layout throwing away altgr.

------
SwellJoe
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 willing to burn the whole goddamned
business model to the ground to stop it. I disable AdBlock Plus for sites that
I know to behave responsibly with regard to their ads (reddit, probably a
couple of others). If there were a list of Advertising Good Citizens who never
use auto-starting audio ads (such a list would probably need to demand a few
other things, like a good privacy policy, no popups/popunders, etc., but audio
is the single reason I installed AdBlock Plus), that could be dropped into
AdBlock Plus, I would happily use it. I don't mind ads, but the second
somebody disrupts my work, my conversation on Skype, my partner's sleep, my
music listening, etc. is the second I grow to hate the site and the
advertiser.

~~~
43081j
Just enable click-to-play in chrome, on media plugins. Sound only ever really
auto-plays from flash ads and such (though these days its possible with HTML5
and this likely won't stop such audio/video). Its an extra click and can make
some sites a bit more difficult (e.g. beatport, tries to hide its flash so you
cant click it to enable it), but it works for me.

~~~
rewqfdsa
Click-to-play on plugins often breaks sites that use Flash ads as overlays.
The ads often have the "close this ad" in the Flash code itself, making it
impossible to kill the ad layer without activating the plugin. (In my more
cynical moments, I wonder whether this behavior is by design.)

~~~
panzi
> making it impossible to kill the ad layer

Use the context menu. There is an option to "hide" (delete) the ad there.

Another option is this bookmarklet (only works if the element that should be
deleted isn't in an iframe):

    
    
        javascript:(function(){var e=document.body.style.cursor;document.body.style.cursor="crosshair";var t=document.createElement("div");var n="border:1px solid #3280FF;background-color:rgba(50,128,255,0.5);position:absolute;z-index:2147483647;display:none;";var r="pointer-events:none;";var i="transition:width 60ms,height 60ms,left 60ms,top 60ms;";n+=r+"-webkit-"+r+"-moz-"+r;n+=i+"-webkit-"+i+"-moz-"+i;t.setAttribute("style",n);document.body.appendChild(t);var s=null;var o=function(e){var n=e.target;if(n!==s&&n.parentNode){var r=n.getBoundingClientRect();var i=document.documentElement;var o=document.body;var u=i.clientTop||o.clientTop||0;var a=i.clientLeft||o.clientLeft||0;var f=window.pageYOffset||i.scrollTop||o.scrollTop;var l=window.pageXOffset||i.scrollLeft||o.scrollLeft;var c=l-a+r.left-1;var h=f-u+r.top-1;t.style.display="block";t.style.left=c+"px";t.style.top=h+"px";t.style.width=r.width+"px";t.style.height=r.height+"px";s=n}};var u=function(n){document.body.style.cursor=e;if(n.target.parentNode)n.target.parentNode.removeChild(n.target);if(t.parentNode)t.parentNode.removeChild(t);window.removeEventListener("click",u,false);window.removeEventListener("mouseover",o,false);n.stopPropagation();n.preventDefault()};window.addEventListener("mouseover",o,false);window.addEventListener("click",u,false)})();void(0)

------
MicroBerto
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.

~~~
njloof
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!

~~~
otis_inf
I have an atom dual core small PC connected to my TV (it runs windows 7, yeah
I know) and it's 'ok-ish' with performance, but starting a browser is a tad
slow (chrome) and adblock makes it even slower as it's a plugin which is
particularly slow to start. So I don't think blocking ads for performance
reasons on slow machines is still cutting it if you take into account the
performance penalty of abp.

All things considered however, it's IMHO a small price to pay for having the
freedom to decide which content is fetched during page rendering and thus
which services won't know whether you're visiting a certain webpage.

------
neals
I used to not do Adblock, because you know, ads make the internet go round and
all that.

But with the "download here"-button ads, there is no way to know what button
to press anymore. Now installing Adblock is a requirement.

~~~
rtpg
Honestly, I've only seen the "tricky" Download Now buttons on shady video
websites (read: those that have all the episodes of Seinfeld on them).

Though I've had more and more invasive ads in newspaper sites (the fact that I
get so many ads on NYT's site despite being a subscriber is frustrating to say
the least), I do like keeping free websites running. I find using ABP to be
somew immoral , violating the contract with which you're looking at someone's
content. I have less sympathy for people who are basically showing stolen
content (not technically stolen , but still), though...

~~~
frostmatthew
> the fact that I get so many ads on NYT's site despite being a subscriber is
> frustrating to say the least

Have you never seen the print edition of the NYT (or any other newspaper)?
Since they just use news to fill in the otherwise blank areas between ads the
motto really should be _all the news that fits, we print_.

~~~
voyou
"they just use news to fill in the otherwise blank areas between ads"

That is pretty much literally true. When I worked on a student newspaper, it
was pretty common for the advertising manager to rush in to the editorial
offices and say things like "I've just sold another full-page ad, so we're
going to be printing extra pages - do you have any copy to fill them?"

~~~
chimeracoder
> When I worked on a student newspaper, it was pretty common for the
> advertising manager to rush in to the editorial offices and say things like
> "I've just sold another full-page ad, so we're going to be printing extra
> pages - do you have any copy to fill them?"

Perhaps at a student paper, though that's considered a pretty huge ethical
breach. I can attest that the New York Times definitely does not do that; they
take this separation very seriously. Even at their headquarters, as of
relatively recently, business and editorial enter through separate elevators,
as they are on opposite sides of the building.

There definitely are publications without such strong and heavily enforced
senses of editorial ethics, but the New York Times is not one of them.

~~~
matthewmacleod
That's bollocks - it's not in the slightest an ethical breach to do that. It's
just advertising working with production to make the product. We're not
talking about running advertorial or anything.

The papers I've worked on usually had a little flexibility in terms of extra
copy or advertising to populate pages as required.

~~~
chimeracoder
> it's not in the slightest an ethical breach to do that. It's just
> advertising working with production to make the product.

Well, that by definition would be considered an ethical violation at a paper
like the Times. Not at a student paper, no, but at the New York Times,
definitely.

~~~
anigbrowl
They're not asking for any adjustment to the content, but for extra content,
eg a feature piece that isn't tied to a particular date. Bear in mind that a
full-page ad only covers one side of the paper so you need something for the
reverse side, and newspapers are generally printed on folding sheets (ie 4
pages to a sheet), so that means 3 extra pages to be filled. It's not like the
advertising department content is suggesting which content to use. Every
newspaper has a variable pile of feature material whose exact publication date
depends on the size of the print run, which is highly variable.

I'm curious about what you think the ethical breach here is. Advertising and
editorial departments _have_ to coordinate on practical matters like page
layout.

------
elorant
I’d rather pay a few dozen bucks to buy more RAM than running the risk of been
infected by malware served from compromised ad servers. Not to mention the
significant decrease in aesthetics/usability when pages include a dozen
different ad areas.

~~~
Kiro
I don't know about aesthetics. I've found that AdBlock actually destroys a lot
of the symmetry since the page was designed with ad elements in place.

~~~
drey08
That could actually be a novel technique against ad blocking. Make the website
dysfunctional if the ads can't be displayed.

~~~
ianlevesque
Yeah, having an option to pay for the site instead would just be crazy.

~~~
ferrari8608
Having to pay to visit all of the sites out there which are currently using
ads would pretty much ruin the internet for most people. Having a big banner
at the top asking for donations seems to work rather well, though. See gnu.org
and wikipedia.org for examples (though Wikipedia's donation campaign this year
is a bit excessive IMO).

~~~
w1ntermute
FYI, you can hide the Wikipedia donation campaign banners by putting this in a
userscript that @matches [http://*.wikipedia.org/*](http://*.wikipedia.org/*):

    
    
        setTimeout(function() {
            fundraisingBanner.hide();
        }, 1000);

~~~
fwn
This ublock custom rule worked for me:

    
    
      ||https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/special:bannerloader

------
TeMPOraL
> _In Nethercote’s testing, he found that TechCrunch used around 194MB of RAM
> without ABP enabled_

194MB for a single webpage that should mainly be text communicating a message.
Does anyone else than me find this crazy?

~~~
nnethercote
> a single webpage that should mainly be text communicating a message

That was more or less true of the web in, say, 1995.

Today, a web browser is an advanced programming environment with broad
multimedia capabilities (including audio, video, and 2D and 3D graphics) that
also happens to have some excellent document presentation features relating to
text and images.

(Edit: I previously said this much better here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743284](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743284))

You may think this is a bad thing, and that's a reasonable opinion to have.
But if you think it's not true you'll only mislead yourself.

~~~
clarry
> Today, a web browser is an advanced programming environment with broad
> multimedia capabilities

It doesn't matter what the tool is to you. When we're visiting something like
techcrunch, we're there for the text and then maybe a few pictures.

------
alopecoid
A bit off topic, but could someone explain to me why it's so difficult for a
browser (or extension) to effectively block 100% of all pop-ups/pop-unders? I
realize that these account for only a fraction of ads, but they are really
annoying and it seems that these should be the easiest to detect; doesn't this
essentially boil down to a few specific API calls? For the few cases that a
pop-up/pop-under is legitimate (really, are there any?), I'd be fine
whitelisting these on a case-by-case basis.

~~~
cozuya
Effectively you're asking for all document.createElement calls to be blocked.
Those are used for all sorts of things that aren't ads or popups. Blocking
that would probably cause a very large percent of pages to be completely
broken.

~~~
alopecoid
So there's no explicit way to distinguish between "new window" calls from
other types of calls? I'm kind of shocked that, with all the effort that's
been put into browsers in recent years, that the ability to "create a new
window" hasn't been removed entirely from the API without explicit user
consent. Again, I can't think of a single site that uses this feature
legitimately.

~~~
cozuya
If you're talking about actual new windows that are a separate process, those
have been blocked by popup blockers for years. As far as popovers that block
the screen/annoy you, those are just HTML elements that are positioned on top
of normal content - its not a "special" thing backed into the DOM API. There's
really no effective way to stop a page from being able to do that unless you
disable javascript entirely.

~~~
nitrogen
There have been tricks that get popups through, possibly by exploiting browser
bugs or opening the popup in one of the few on* handlers where browsers allow
them.

------
ben0x539
Sounds like if Mozilla wants to improve Firefox memory usage, they should work
on blocking ads natively so people don't need Adblock Plus.

<:D

~~~
nnethercote
You're going to love Tracking Protection: [http://monica-at-
mozilla.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/tracking-pr...](http://monica-at-
mozilla.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/tracking-protection-in-firefox.html)

It's an in-development feature to block parts of websites that track you. In
practice, it mostly blocks ads, and it blocks most ads. And it doesn't have
the performance/memory hit of AdBlock Plus for two reasons:

* The domain matching is simpler (no regexps) and thus much faster.

* It doesn't use CSS to fix up the layout of pages that have had ads removed; it just leaves blank white rectangles. (AdBlock Plus has lots of complex and even site-specific CSS code to do this.)

(I've been told this by one of the Tracking Protection developers, though I
may have got the details slightly wrong.)

In testing done by its developers, it speeds up the load time of the median
page by 20%! So overall it gives more privacy, less page clutter, and faster
browsing. Fantastic stuff.

~~~
tracker1
What's funny is when you take the time to ensure than your layout will reflow
nicely with ad blockers.. actually having the empty spaces is a bit worse
imho.

Wondering about catching on-error events for iframes.. or load errors, etc...
that may help in detection, and reflow. I'm more concerned about things
continuing to look nice with adblockers than circumventing them.

------
dendory
What kind of fucked up site has 10+ iframes per page, let alone hundreds? And
the example site he uses takes 530megs to load even without addons. I'm
sensing the issue is somewhere other than Adblock Plus.

~~~
jasonthevillain
Actually, that's not crazy. Ads, social widgets (the Facebook Like button),
third party comment boxes, etc. all render in iframes.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
No, they _may_ render in iframes; iframes are certainly not a requirement for
any of those features, and some (the original commenter included, I suspect)
might consider them a heavy-handed approach to the problem.

~~~
aboodman
iframes are the only unit of isolation on the web. Unless you want the like
button you're hosting to have complete unrestricted access to your
application's private data, then yeah, the like button needs to be in an
iframe.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
What's wrong with a simple link? I know _facebook_ doesn't want you going down
that route, but there's nothing to stop you.

~~~
skeoh
The Facebook like button tells you when you've already liked a page. It can
also show you how many likes a page has, which a simple link cannot do.

The like button is just one of many of Facebook's components which can be
embedded into pages; another being the comment box which shows your name and
display picture but cannot allow the hosting page to get at that information
unauthorized.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Well there _are_ ways of presenting a personalised link, and a link containing
a total number, without resorting to iframes, or even client-side code. I'm
not seriously suggesting they be used, merely pointing out that the multiple-
iframes functionality is not a default requirement of every page on the web,
as the article suggests. Some studies have shown that articles with facebook
like buttons receive fewer likes than those without.

FWIW, on a site I work for, we use a plain facebook like link without any
personalisation because that's all we require, and we recognise that it
respects our visitors' privacy more than the full-on iframe variant.

------
currysausage
My current favorite solution for blocking the more annoying ads and increasing
security while preserving a low-latency browsing experience: Click-to-play for
Flash Player (and all the other plug-ins).

There are lots of gray boxes now all over the web, but I prefer them over
resource-hungry attention-grabbing Flash ads.

~~~
delecti
It's amazing how well this improves the experience of using the internet with
such a small change.

Rarely there are sites that hide their flash elements if they aren't loaded
properly, which can make it difficult to click them, but then you just
whitelist the website if it's really important.

------
kasabali
Previous discussion (and a related one):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743064](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743064)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7765758](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7765758)

------
sinemetu11
I use a modified hosts file instead which is much better. See
[http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/](http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/)
Remember the web is pull not push.

~~~
jacquesm
Hosts files only work when the ads and other trash are not served from the
same domain, and of course the bigger operators do everything they can to make
you lose some critical functionality if you block their ad serving IPs.

So you'll need to go to the URL level at a minimum if you don't want to use
some important functionality.

~~~
Nanzikambe
Actually this very rarely happens.

I a DNS server on my router which has zone that routes all ad hosting & other
wanted stuff to an IP which is then rejected by the firewall.

I also have a transparent proxy rewriting all web pages removing IFRAMEs -
this does ocassionally break things, but it's extremely rare to find a site
that actually has a use for them other than serving ads.

~~~
verisimilitude
Both the DNS and the transparent proxy sound like an interesting way to
improve the web at home (I'm thinking specifically of an iPhone on my WiFi) --
do you have more information about how you did these things?

~~~
Nanzikambe
I use a chrooted instance of Bind as it's a LAN only dns server,
/etc/bind/named.conf includes:

    
    
        include "/etc/bind/adblock.conf";
    

That file is generated by a script that uses a hosts file maintained on
[http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/](http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/) the
script is something like:

    
    
        #!/bin/bash
        cat /etc/bind/adblock.conf | xz -z - > /etc/bind/adblock.conf-$(date "+%Y%m%d-%H%M%S").xz
        echo "" > /etc/bind/adblock.conf
        curl -o - http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ | sed -rn 's:^127\.0\.0\.1 ([^ #\t]+).*$:\1:p' > /tmp/addrs.txt
        cat /tmp/addrs.txt | while read line; do
          ! egrep -i $line /etc/bind/whitelist.txt >/dev/null \
            && echo 'zone "'${line}'" IN { type master;notify no; file "/etc/bind/pri/adblock.zone";};' >> /etc/bind/adblock.conf
        done
    

which can be called from cron or similar (if you do you need to reload/SIGHUP
bind to reload its condiguration) you can whitelist stuff by adding a FQDN to
/etc/bind/whitelist.txt

The file /etc/bind/pri/adblock.zone contains something like:

    
    
        @  1        IN      SOA  localhost.   root.localhost. (1000 7200 120 1209600 3600) 
        @  259200   IN      NS   localhost. 
        *  259200   IN      A    X.X.X.X
        @  2        IN      A    X.X.X.X
    

where X.X.X.X is an IP on different (but private and not internet routable)
subnet, and iptables rules something like:

    
    
        iptables -N DNSBLACKHOLE
        iptables -A DNSBLACKHOLE -j LOG --log-prefix "DNSBLACKHOLE ::" 
        iptables -A DNSBLACKHOLE -j REJECT
        iptables -A OUTPUT -p all -d X.X.X.X -j DNSBLACKHOLE
        iptables -A FORWARD -p all -d X.X.X.X -j DNSBLACKHOLE
    

Transparent proxying is accomplished by iptables rules redirecting port 80 and
443 through SQUID which essentially performs a MITM, you can find out how to
do this here:

[http://blog.davidvassallo.me/2011/03/22/squid-transparent-
ss...](http://blog.davidvassallo.me/2011/03/22/squid-transparent-ssl-
interception/)

Edit: it's also worth mentioning I transparently redirect all DNS traffic the
router sees to my own bind instance, so untrusted devices are unable to use an
alternative dns server.

~~~
verisimilitude
Thank you very very much for taking the time to write this up!

------
ddorian43
Isn't using 200MB for a webpage(techcrunch) actually bad in the first place ?

Do all designers work on their iExpensiveMachine and don't care about other
peoples lower-end machines/phones/tables/whatever?

~~~
rtpg
this is mainly due to having many images on your website (memory can store
uncompressed images to save CPU cycles when rendering)

Also, last I checked, most phones have 1 to 2 gigs of RAM, and they're not
keeping many tabs in memory. If the RAM is there, using it is not really an
issue (until you start getting into the whole virtual memory stuff I guess)

~~~
awalton
> 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 themselves from this
madness. A modern webpage needs 10+ iframes? Absolutely bullshit.

~~~
tracker1
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 techniques can be used to
reserve space and load when a section comes into view, but that's not always
prudent.

Images are crucial, and optimizing your rendering is also becoming more
crucial.. just the same, not everything on the web is text.. and I'd say
people spend more time on the web looking at pictures than text, not to
mention video.

~~~
awalton
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.

------
brazzledazzle
There's a couple inaccurate things in that article that stood out at me. It
should be pretty easy to measure the CPU hit when running ABP. It looks like
the author is running windows so he should be able to use perfmon. He also
mentions that "As with all proxy servers, though, the one caveat is that it
doesn’t work with HTTPS connections" which is very much wrong.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Also, the article's claim that most pages on the web make use of several
iframes is laughable conjecture. Using their own site's poorly put-together
home page as an example does not prove their point. And claiming that all free
content on the web only exists because of advertising is disingenuous, to say
the least.

~~~
tracker1
True enough.. most iframes these days are ads.. which ABP blocks.. and the
majority of the rest seem to be social widgets which are nearly as bad... I
hate them all myself.. though I get why they may be wanted.

------
jacquesm
He's definitely on to something here, FF with a hundred or so tabs open:

With ABP:

    
    
       12961 XXXXXX    20   0 2615960 1.483g  58692 S  45.2  9.5   2:13.00 firefox 
    

Without:

    
    
       13098 XXXXXX     20   0 2157212 1.109g  57476 R 142.6  7.1   1:26.25 firefox                              
    

Both after a complete stop and start of the browser, restoring every tab by
activating it.

~~~
VLM
This provides an engineering anecdote that adblocking is worth more than half
a gig to a large fraction of the population. Looking at prices on tigerdirect
you're dropping about $10 per gig (I'm sure apple charges $200 per gig for
laptops, but they're price insensitive so don't matter). Anyway that provides
a data point that ad blocking is worth at least $5 to the average user.

Also from a scaling perspective I wonder if its linear with tabs. There are
various tribes of tab users and if its linear, a "normal user" who uses about
3 or so would scale down to approximately nil.

~~~
dannypgh
"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)

~~~
justinhj
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.

~~~
dannypgh
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.

------
ghantila
I uninstalled right after hearing from Mozilla [1] about the effects of
AdBlock Plus on Firefox. Since, then I'm blocking things manually.

First I was using this [2] hosts file by Dan Pallock. But now I've switched to
this Neocities [3] hosted site. I don't know who manages this site, but the
entries are uniquely sorted from various sources, which includes entries from
Dan Pallock's hosts file.

Apart from this, I use Privacy Badger [4], Self-Destructing Cookies [5],
HTTPS-Everywhere [6] and Disconnect [7].

[1] [https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-
plus...](https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-pluss-effect-
on-firefoxs-memory-usage/)

[2] [http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/](http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/)

[3] [https://hosts.neocities.org/](https://hosts.neocities.org/)

[4] [https://www.eff.org/privacybadger](https://www.eff.org/privacybadger)

[5] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-
destruct...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destructing-
cookies/)

[6] [https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere](https://www.eff.org/https-
everywhere)

[7] [https://disconnect.me/](https://disconnect.me/)

~~~
drdaeman
There's also a Policeman [1] that works using fast and powerful domain-and-
request-type matching. No thousands of injected CSS rules or anything like
this, that persist and consume memory. Think of hosts file on steroids, that's
able to differentiate between image, script and flash requests.

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/policeman/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/policeman/)

------
shmerl
Didn't ABP+ developers plan to address this? How is that effort going?

UPDATE: Here is the bug to track:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=988266](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=988266)

------
arthurk
I've been using
[http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/](http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/) for
almost a year now and it works very well. No need for adblock.

------
jim_greco
I wish the internet was usable without it.

~~~
megalodon
This. The ongoing arms race between advertisers and adblockers damage content
delivery, which is why I'm hoping for a solution which can replace ads in the
near future. Maybe Google Contributor is onto something.

I would recommend trying the Reader view in Safari (I'm sure there's similar
functionality in other browsers) to read articles without clutter. Works like
a charm.

~~~
briandear
Reader is especially killer in mobile. A huge percentage of sites are
incredible horrible on mobile-- and it isn't even the ads as much as all of
the sharing, pull quotes and modals. Why the heck do people have modals for
mobile? The insanity of it.

------
legulere
I don't even use an adblocker. I simply use ghostery to block trackers and
almost no ads being there anymore is a nice side-effect.

~~~
atoponce
Ghostery is proprietary software, and it's reporting your usage back to
trackers if you enable Ghostrank. You would be better protected running
Privacy Badger by the EFF. It's Free Software, and it doesn't track you.

[https://www.eff.org/privacybadger](https://www.eff.org/privacybadger)

~~~
MikeKusold
> Although we like Disconnect, Adblock Plus, Ghostery and similar products (in
> fact Privacy Badger is based on the ABP code!)

Privacy Badger most likely has the same issue that this article is talking
about.

~~~
kasabali
The problem is not Adblock Plus engine, it's ABP injecting 4 MB CSS to every
single page, while Privacy Badger doesn't, so it is not a problem.

~~~
atoponce
Indeed. After tracking my tasks in Chromium, I have found that Privacy Badger
regularly and consistently sits at about 1/2 the RAM usage of uBlock.

------
Animats
Maybe I should write one.

I wrote AdLimiter, (adlimiter.com) which eliminates certain ads from Google
search result pages. It's really a demo for our site rating service,
SiteTruth,but it has the internal machinery to find and remove ads. The basic
idea is that it finds links to sites in the DOM, and works outward in the DOM
to find the ad boundary. Then, if analysis of the link indicates the ad should
be deleted, the offending section is deleted from the DOM. It takes one linear
pass through the DOM to find ads. If the page changes, five seconds after the
changes quiet down, another pass is made. This approach is reasonably general
and requires little maintenance.

I once looked at AdBlock's code. Internally, AdBlock makes heavy use of
regular expressions and does a lot of searching. It seems to be doing more
work per page than should be necessary.

In some ways, Ghostery is more useful than AdBlock. It blocks most trackers,
which reduces network I/O. Some ads disappear once their tracker is disabled.
(CBS TV shows play without commercials if Ghostery is running.)

I've been toying with the idea of an ad blocker that uses simple machine
learning. All content coming from off-site links gets a light grey overlay. If
you click on the grey overlay, it disappears so you can view the content, and
the off-site link is rated as less spammy. If you ignore the overlay, the off-
site link is viewed as more spammy. The grey overlays gradually get more
opaque over areas where you never remove them, and when they go fully opaque,
the covered content is deleted completely.

~~~
hurin
Loading all content and placing overlays are precisely the reasons Addblock
plus hogs so much RAM, as opposed to simply not loading the content.

~~~
gorhill
There are two kind of filters: cosmetic ("element hiding") and network
filters.

Network filters = to prevent the fetching of remote resources.

Cosmetic filters = to prevent portion of the DOM to be visible.

Adblock won't load any content when filtered through network filters, the
requests to the remote server won't even be made.

The problem the article refers to is related to how cosmetic filters are
implemented in Adblock. And that problem has nothing to do with "placing
overlays", whatever that means.

------
efbbbf
For Firefox, there's Bluhell Firewall

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/bluhell-
firew...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/bluhell-firewall/)

------
zo1
From the article:

>"* The main problem, though, is the process by which ABP actually blocks ads.
Basically, ABP inserts a massive CSS stylesheet — occupying around 4MB of RAM
— into every single webpage that you visit, stripping out the ads.*"

Isn't then the actual problem the way that Adblock+ removes the ads? Why not
simply allow an API for a plugin to easily strip content from a site. If there
is one already, then ABP should switch to it to reduce memory usage. If not,
well then we should look at the actual culprits of this problem which is the
browsers.

~~~
deanclatworthy
In chrome at least it's not in Google's interest to block their customers ads,
or make it any easier to do so.

------
avinassh
I use my Raspberry Pi as ad blocking proxy and I don't have to worry about
performance usage on my machine at all! Some routers allow have this option
built in and also you can block IPs of common ad publishers.

[0] - [https://learn.adafruit.com/raspberry-pi-as-an-ad-blocking-
ac...](https://learn.adafruit.com/raspberry-pi-as-an-ad-blocking-access-
point?view=all#)

------
userbinator
The Proxomitron (local filtering proxy) + HOSTS file + Javascript whitelisting
is all I need.

Turning off JS instantly removes a ton of annoyances, effectively removes a
_huge_ attack area for browser exploits (I've accidentally infected others by
sending them links to sites that had no effect on me...), and while there are
certainly sites that require it (often not even of the "application" type, but
just to do something that could've been done without), the majority of the
ones I come across in e.g. searching for info don't need it. If a site I find
when searching refuses to show anything, then I'll just go back and continue
with the next search result or use Google's text-only cache which often _does_
have the content I'm looking for in a more readable format. The whitelist is
reserved for sites that are both _highly_ trusted and absolutely necessary to
enable JS on.

------
girishso
I have switched to HTTP Switchboard, works pretty well.
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/http-
switchboard/m...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/http-
switchboard/mghdpehejfekicfjcdbfofhcmnjhgaag?hl=en)

~~~
elvis635
You should migrate to umatrix
([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/%C2%B5matrix/ogfcm...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/%C2%B5matrix/ogfcmafjalglgifnmanfmnieipoejdcf)),
http switchboard is not maintained anymore

~~~
hrjet
uMatrix is new and improved, and I use it sometimes, but it is still rough
around the edges. Some websites don't work and there's no work-around.

Edit: To clarify, the above is in comparison to HTTPSB.

~~~
gorhill
From the doc: "µMatrix does not guarantee that sites will work fine: it is for
advanced users who can figure how to un-break sites, because essentially
µMatrix is a firewall which works in block-all/allow-exceptionally mode out of
the box: it is not unexpected that sites will break"

Workaround is to un-block whatever net requests which are causing a site to
break. I can't make sense of "no work-around": unblock everything?

Edit: There is a scope-based switch to completely turn off matrix filtering.

~~~
hrjet
Hi, I am well aware of the matrix and a fan (have been a HTTPSB user and now
test uMatrix sometimes). I am also a contributor to
[https://gngr.info](https://gngr.info) which has a Request Manager inspired by
the matrix.

I was referring to a few issues I encounter in uMatrix which are not present
in HTTPSB. I probably should log them; was not sure if uMatrix is ready for
full-time use yet.

------
pmontra
It's unfortunate and maybe it can be engineered in a better way but still I'm
happy to trade CPU and RAM for uncluttered web pages. Whenever I watch
somebody navigate without AdBlock, I always wonder how they could get used to
make sense of all that mixed mess of ads and content.

Furthermore if sites are paid per click my pre AdBlock contribute to all the
ads sustained web sites was probably way less than $1. They are losing little
by my use of AdBlock. One reason I didn't click ads was precisely that they
are so intrusive and ugly. Thanks to AdBlock I'm spared with that and they
don't lose bandwidth and CPU to serve ads that won't be clicked. Win-win.

------
therzathegza
Increases the SNR of the internet so high, it's actually worth it. I'd rather
spend more on memory and have a less annoying internet :).

Consider the technical solution alternatives, and getting people to use them.
Now look at how easy it is to install ABP.

------
htilonom
Why does the topic say Firefox when µBlock isn't even for Firefox? Chrome is
the problem, not Firefox.

All browsers became huge memory hogs lately, but I'd rather have 100MB+ of RAM
just for Adblock than blinded by ads (of which a lot are malicious).

------
Yizahi
Behold the power of the Time Machine - the text straight from the 90th-00th.
Everyone was like "Oh, this new Windoze uses 500 megs when idle! Then 1000
megs! Then 2000 megs! etc. etc.". Come on people, we are buying our hardware
precisely for this - to be used.

Now this ET site with 28 spyware modules from random advertisers is telling me
- "Don't use your CPU it will make it slower, also don't use too much RAM.
Instead make your brain slower and use more brain memory for useless stuff.
Because you know - think about children, and because we are entitled for our
business model by birth right.".

~~~
gorhill
> we are buying our hardware precisely for this - to be used

I have a counterargument page dedicated to apologists of inefficient software:
[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Who-cares-about-
effic...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Who-cares-about-
efficiency,-I-have-8-GB-and%7Cor-a-quad-core-CPU)

~~~
Yizahi
Good argument but I still don't agree with it completely. First of all lets
separate devices into three categories - desktops, laptops and touchscreen.

For desktops CPU and RAM are largely irrelevant in such amount (temporary up
to 25-50% CPU usage increase for one core, and up to 500-1000Mb of memory
usage increase in worst case - for instance my FF never exceeds 1Gb overall
with ABP and other stuff). I sometimes "fix" old PCs for relatives and even in
worst cases ABP usage isn't a noticeable hit on performance.

For laptops resources are more relevant as well as battery life. I'll even
agree with your point for this category, but still for now ABP hit is not that
big as compared to ad noise.

For touchscreens resources are very important BUT! This is a very big "BUT".
But the websites are almost unusable without adblock. I use iphone and ipad
where there are no adblockers afaik. When I browse the web it is horrible
(with a big H - Horrible) - everything is jumping, jiggling and wobbling for a
long time during page load. One moment there is a text in some point and I try
to scroll - and instantly there appears stupid facebook crap which I of course
click. Same with multiple frames, banners, popups (I hope these devs will burn
in hell). And additionally there weird motion gestures in-built into page,
transparent overlays which are part of a nearest ad. The list goes on...

Basically on touchscreens web browsing experience is so horrible that I'm
willing to trade adblocker for x2 increase in battery consumption (note that
web browsing is not the only thing to do on a phone or tablet, so this is not
a total x2 lifetime decrease).

------
0dmethz
Use AdBlock. Not AdBlock Plus.

Remember: ABP = Shit. AB = Good.

~~~
Trellmor
Or use Adblock Edge [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/adblock-
edge/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/) which is
a Adblock Plus fork minus the "acceptable ads" feature.

~~~
kasabali
...which is based on outdated code base.

------
jervisfm
I realized that Adblock plus was a performance hog a long time ago and it is
good to see that information being shared widely. The issue especially impacts
those who have many many tabs open all at once.

Interestingly, there is a uBlock alternative which I had not heard about[1].
If the more efficient claims are true, it would definitely be worthwhile to
switch over to that instead.

[1] [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/%C2%B5Block-
vs.-ABP:-...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/%C2%B5Block-
vs.-ABP:-efficiency-compared)

------
panzi
> click-to-play add-ons like Flashblock

You don't need an add-on for that. Firefox and Chrome both have this as an
optional built-in feature. I think it should be on by default (which it sadly
isn't).

------
wyclif
Here's what I do for Firefox and AdBlock Plus:

Under "Filter Preferences", uncheck everything marked EasyList. Under "Custom
Filters" add _EasyList without element hiding rules_ and make sure it's
checked. Restart. This speeds things up considerably.

On Chromium I don't use AdBlock Plus, it's too much of a memory hog. Instead,
I use the much leaner and faster µBlock for dynamic filtering:

[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/)

------
ddingus
I have been running Firefox without any blocker for a long time. Didn't mind
the ADS, and I thought it an easy way to fund various things.

No worries, until those video and audio ads got out of control.

Some pages would bury my machine! And it's a good machine too. 2012 Mac Book
Pro.

The memory profile of Firefox itself is kind of a pig, but not something I
would worry too much about. Firefox with those ads? Out of control. Firefox
with simple Adblock is back to no worries again.

I'll have to give uBlock a try.

------
gondo
what about forking chromium and integrating adblock directly in the browser?
+removing all the google nonsense (like disabled cross domain security for
some google domains)

~~~
sup
Check out Iron

[http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php](http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php)

------
matkam
Honorable mention, privoxy:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743261](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743261)

------
getdavidhiggins
Related

[http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/](http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/) HN
Thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6002544](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6002544)

Make sure localhost / 127.0.0.1 resolves to something though. A blank
`index.html` in the root is lightweight enough. For the perfnerds, you can
resolve it using lighthttpd

------
ChrisGranger
My computer is a Windows Vista-era relic with 2 GB of RAM and I rarely have
any trouble browsing unless I've got loads of tabs open (which would
undoubtedly gobble all of my memory regardless).

I'm using RequestPolicyContinued. Using a whitelist for third-party requests
seems to do a lot of the heavy lifting so that my Adblock Plus filters are
limited to a handful of specific things I don't want to see.

------
snird
I'm using Ghostery as a privacy and ad-blocking extension. Does anyone have
data on the impact Ghostery might have on the browser memory usage?

~~~
gorhill
Ghostery/Disconnect are leaner memory-wise than uBlock [1]. That is for their
own memory footprint. I do not know how much they contribute memory overhead
to web pages though, but I suspect not much. I have never benchmarked
Ghostery/Disconnect CPU-wise.

[1] [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Own-memory-
usage:-ben...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Own-memory-
usage:-benchmarks-over-time#18-september-2014)

~~~
beagle3
I've dropped ghostery about 3 years ago because, even though it was low on
memory, it was extremely CPU hungry, making my (then a little old, but by no
mean underpowered) laptop take 3-4 seconds of 100% CPU for almost every page.

I haven't tried it again since.

------
thegeomaster
I can completely agree with this. I have a shitty machine with 2GB RAM and
it's more often than not that it freezes almost completely when I compile
bigg(ish) projects because it hits swap. I keep my Firefox open all the time
(who doesn't?) and since I disabled AdBlock Plus this wasn't an issue anymore,
and from 1.2GB Firefox's resident set size has plummeted to 500MB for me.

------
Walkman
There was a very good discussion [1] about this 8 months ago when I realized
the same [2].

I suggest try HTTP Switchboard instead (see the previous thread).

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7765758](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7765758)

[2]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7765904](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7765904)

~~~
gorhill
I am not maintaining HTTPSB anymore. I refactored HTTPSB into uBlock/uMatrix.
Many cringing usability issues[1] have been fixed with uMatrix, which is
different enough from HTTPSB that I could not publish it as a newer version of
HTTPSB.

[1] [https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/wiki/Changes-from-HTTP-
Sw...](https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/wiki/Changes-from-HTTP-Switchboard)

~~~
Walkman
Thanks! I did not know about this, I will definitely use them.

------
pmelendez
I do not use and Ad Blocker and Firefox and Chrome always devour my RAM. I
can't imagine how worse would be with a Adblocker

------
_greim_
I don't mind ads most of the time. I have a script that rips out iframes,
flash and other junk, and does a few other "cleansing" operations. It works
fairly well and it's satisfying to push the "zap" button when a certain page
is getting particularly annoying, and see all those rectangles become suddenly
blank.

------
mmgutz
Noscript is not an option anymore. Too many sites rely on javascript. I'll
take the memory hit every time to use adblock.

~~~
_JamesA_
I would counter and say NoScript is still an option.

I want to control what sites I allow to execute scripts in my browser rather
than give global authority to any random site I may happen to land on.

I see no value in allowing scripts from Facebook or Twitter, for example, to
run on any of the sites I visit.

~~~
jccalhoun
I would agree with the op that noscript is not an option any more but only
because I think the widespread use of javascript makes it mandatory for sane
web use.

------
thibauts
I made a host filtering proxy with node a while ago to solve exactly this
problem. [https://github.com/thibauts/node-host-filtering-
proxy](https://github.com/thibauts/node-host-filtering-proxy)

Edge cases are not completely ironed out but if people want to help perfect it
I'll very happily accept PRs !

------
101914
I use DNS to block ads when control over the HOSTS file is not available to
the user.

Works across all applications, e.g. browsers, apps, and requires no
installation of third party software e.g. extensions.

I'm curious: do these ad blocking "solutions" operate as businesses? Do ad
servers pay to be removed from blacklists? Pardon my ignorance.

------
sumitviii
[http://i.imgur.com/UPW4iFD.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/UPW4iFD.jpg)

Now that's real irony.

------
kolev
They are memory hogs with or without particular extensions. I leave Chrome
with 10 basic tabs open and in 4 hours, it's already "using" 2GB of RAM. The
new Firefox Developer Edition with "process per tab" is similar. The best
resource-friendly browser on OS X is Safari.

~~~
brymaster
> The best resource-friendly browser on OS X is Safari.

You may find others having an opposite experience:

[http://i.imgur.com/qfwwXhw.png](http://i.imgur.com/qfwwXhw.png) :)

~~~
mitchty
I can beat that a skosh. Here is adblock safari (granted this was with adblock
on and safari running a while).

[http://imgur.com/J1rP6V0](http://imgur.com/J1rP6V0)

Safari+adblock+ any amount of tabs+history = I want 64g of ram on my laptop
stat.

------
joeyyang
I was recently having a ton of memory issues with Chrome without Adblock
installed -- turns out a lot of Chrome extensions are memory hogs.

A quick `ps aux` will let you see what extensions are the worst offenders;
clearing out a bunch of unused extensions helped restore my computer back to
normal.

------
sly010
Isn't there a way for adblock+ to insert just the right set of css rules based
on the page it is inserted to? It's not like every site displays ads from
every possible ad network. I don't know the internals of AB+ so correct me if
this is impossible for some reason.

------
mavsman
Totally worth any memory issues it causes. I jumped on Safari the other day
without it and it was awful.

------
st3fan
You can remove the 'probably'. It is pretty well known that Adblock is a mayor
memory hog.

------
RRRA
Some ad blocking should definitely be built in for performance reason then ...

------
agumonkey
I often send URL to printfriendly, most of the time it's light, readable and
ads-free. Works with Firefox keyword tags (added manually) and with Chrom*
urlbar (added automatically after a few visits).

------
dreadfulgoat
I just realized that getting something like AdBlock as a transparent default
in major browsers is something that could actually kill Google as we know it.

A lot hinges on modern auto-update pipelines.

------
cm3
For blocking hosts you can also use
[https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/Adsuck](https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/Adsuck)

------
linuxhansl
I just maintain my own small custom list, all automatic lists are disabled.
Ads are OK unless they are animated, IMHO. Flash is totally out of course. In
fact I think I am doing these advertisers a favor since I do keep a mental
list of who _not_ to buy from, that list includes folks who have animated and
flash ads (and those who advertise on Fox News, but that is a different
story).

So I usually just block ads that are really obnoxious. Every few months I
review the list and remove any entry that was filtered less than 10 times or
so.

That has two advantages. First _I_ get to control what is filtered, and second
it prevents that list from growing so much.

------
atoponce
It's nice, but it seems to be a bit overly aggressive. As an example, it's
removing the "Share to Twitter" button on my TT-RSS install.

------
mbrock
I once did some profiling on a heavy single page app and found that the
overhead of AdBlock+'s extreme amount of CSS selectors was a major culprit.

------
philip1209
If we can curate a list of ad domains, then adding them to the hosts file and
null-routing the DNS would both remove ads and be super quick

~~~
aendruk
Like this?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8802746](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8802746)

------
gcb0
if you want to get rid of intrusive ads and tracking, you should use hosts
file from someonewhocares.org

because ad block won't work on mobiles, and devices owned more by Google/apple
than yourself.

if you want to block malicious scripts and plugins you should use noscript.

both will actually improve memory use and performance, not to mention getting
closer to solving the problem in the first place

------
mattmurdog
Why would this even matter with the type of machines we have today? I'm sure
your 8gigs can handle a little Ad Block.

------
jordanpg
Has anyone seen analysis that covers Adblock in addition to Adblock Plus? Do
the same findings still obtain?

------
lukastsai
a mobile readable version:
[https://getscroll.com/r/mdqbs](https://getscroll.com/r/mdqbs)

I'm using
[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock) to
replace Adblock plus since last week.

------
foxhill
being a.. "tech" person, i always get grief from people when i tell them i
don't use adblock. "you should know better" or words to that effect.

this would explain why i've never considered chrome to be a memory hog..
(although, all my machines have a _lot_ of memory, too)

------
sandsand
I seems an overstatement to me. I would say it's misuse of iframes and only
then adblock.

------
bourbon
I use Ghost and Adblock+ with Chromium, and I've never had an issue with
memory.

------
jmgtan
I've been using GlimmerBlock for quite sometime without running into issues

------
pwr22
This is already shown to be the case with FF, ABP uses a lot of memory per tab

------
ins0
yeah iframes on every modern webpage... a problem is the adblock injection and
it cost of curse. but please don't blame iframes for this...no one use iframes
anymore accept for ads

~~~
icelancer
Er, Google? Payment providers who need a secure frame?

------
XorNot
This doesn't explain how Chrome, on a PC which is just serving a simple
billboard page with some dynamic Jquery to update it, ends up using 4gb of RAM
after a few hours despite no Javascript memory leaks.

------
Pxtl
I find its a hog and I don't run those.

------
seoguru
handy trick: install "incognito this tab"
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/incognito-this-
tab...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/incognito-this-
tab/nhockicmnnjibbhgcpphjicilgcfehdi?hl=en) if adblocker is interfering with
page, right mouse click and bring up tab in incognito mode (which doesn't load
extensions unless specified).

~~~
tokenizerrr
Or you just whitelist the site through the adblock menu and enable adblock for
incognito as well. Most sites I tend to visit through incognito are somewhat
ad-heavy, and I'd rather still block them there.

------
znowi
tl;dr "Please do not use ad blockers" – Ad industry

------
anon4
I see nobody has posted it, so here is a very lightweight alternative - it
redirects all known ad-hosting sites to 127.0.0.1

[http://someonewhocares.org/hosts](http://someonewhocares.org/hosts)

~~~
zeitg3ist
Isn't it better to use something invalid (like 0.0.0.0) instead of 127.0.0.1?
If you have a development server on your machine, rerouting ads to 127.0.0.1
means lots of useless requests...

~~~
jmiwhite
The author briefly discusses this and has made a 0.0.0.0 version available
here:
[http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero/](http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero/)

------
frik
It's a chicken egg problem.

1) _Website owners_ use ads to earn money (server and employee costs,
revenue).

2) Several _Ad networks_ create ads that influence and annoy users and track
their browser habits. e.g. blinking buggy video ads with sound that sometimes
even crash the flash plugin

3) _Visitors_ install Adblock+ because they dislike intrusive ads that don't
adhere to the browser privacy settings. Some websites are unusable without an
ad-blocker. Many websites even crash the mobile browser.

4) _Companies buy ads_ cheaper as ads are clicked in reality by clicking-bots
and are worth less than years ago.

4) _Website owner_ places more ads because the earn less for the same amount
of served ads as last year and because more and more block all ads altogether.

5) Even more _visitors_ install adblockers and turn them on for all websites.

6) _Website owners_ introduce a paywall so that parts of their content or
everything is behind closed doors for paying customers only.

7) The _visitors_ switch to alternative website that offer comparable content
for free, monetized by ads or maintained as hobby.

8) and so on...

 _Paywalls_ are not the solution. Another website will appear that offers
comparable content for free. Example: _The Microsoft Network_ (MSN 1) that was
meant to replace the WWW in 1995 and shipped with Win95. Bill Gates had to
rewrite his vision of the information highway, micro payments and Microsoft
Network in his famous book "The Road Ahead", half a year later as MSN failed
and WWW succeeded he released a second book edition that removed all
references and now acknowledges the WWW. Pictures of MSN 1:
[http://winsupersite.com/windows-live/msn-inside-
story](http://winsupersite.com/windows-live/msn-inside-story)

Everyone has to change a bit, to improve the current status:

* The _ad-networks_ that still code flash-based ads should move to HTML5.

* The _companies that buy ad-space_ from such ad-networks should care more about the ad-quality.

* The _website owners_ should care more about which ad-network they select.

* The _visitors_ should use less adblock-plugins.

* The _WHATWG /W3C/browser developer_ should improve some situations with HTML 5.x so that there is no single reason for flash based ads.

~~~
cerrelio
More of a vicious cycle.

The ad networks bare most of the blame because they face a moral hazard. They
can either deny annoying ads and lose revenue, or accept them and push the
risk of adverse events to the publisher. The publisher will respond as you
describe above. Ultimately the publisher fizzles out and their ad network
drops them for non-performance.

Most ad networks appear to be willing to accept trashy ads in lieu of
instituting quality controls.

This is my experience in working at a publishing network that did not have its
own ad server.

------
psykovsky
I prefer the hosts file way of redirecting ad/tracking domains to localhost.
There are some nice hosts lists already compiled, which you can download to
make your own. The resources problem simply went away when I started doing it
this way.

------
icantthinkofone
To be clear, Adblock Plus is a memory hog that causes issues for Firefox and
Chrome users. The added memory is not a problem of either browser and they do
not cause that themselves.

------
paulhauggis
So, with all the people here doing Adblock. Should I feel bad when startups go
bust because of the lack of advertising dollars?

~~~
frozenport
No because web advertizements are not cost effective for selling products and
while being a poor source of money.

Noted in [http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/farewell-
dr-d...](http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/farewell-dr-
dobbs/240169421)

>> They've come to realize that website ads tend to be less effective than
they once were. Given that I've never bought a single item by clicking on an
ad on a website, this conclusion seems correct in the small

~~~
stevesearer
Web advertisements work great for advertisers familiar with buying advertising
space in magazines where the goal isn't about generating an immediate
purchase.

On my website, office furniture manufacturers use the advertising space to
display their new products to our readers - the majority of whom design office
environments for a living and purchase 0% of the products they use in their
projects on the internet.

------
tek-cyb-org
32gb says not.

------
ddebernardy
> On a modern website, there can be dozens of iframes.

Let me fix that for you:

> On a shit website, there can be dozens of iframes.

------
insin
> Here’s a lovely bit of irony for you: Adblock Plus... is actually increasing
> the amount of memory used by your web browser, rather than decreasing it

It’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.

------
hurin
Firefox gets slower with every update - and it's certainly not Addblock plus
that's at fault (although yes, addblock plus has a very inefficient
implementation.)

If you use Chromium I recommend HTTPSwitchboard.

~~~
mrinterweb
"Firefox gets slower with every update", I don't believe this is still the
case. There have been significant performance improvements in recent versions
of Firefox. If you haven't tried Firefox in a while, I'd recommend giving it
another shot. By what I've seen lately, Firefox might be edging Chrome out in
performance.

~~~
hurin
I still use Firefox for anything where I need to be logged in since I'm rather
uncomfortable about using Google services combined with a Google browser - but
it's definitely a significant performance downgrade.

~~~
scholia
Don't agree. My perception is that Firefox is faster now than it was two years
ago, and today it's generally as fast as or faster than Chrome.

BTW, I'm another that won't log into Google services with a Google-owned
browser: I usually use IE11 for that. But I use Firefox for Microsoft services
...

------
dpweb
This in your JS should hide site content from adblock users (adsense only):

    
    
      window.hasOwnProperty('google_ad_block') || (document.body.innerHTML = 'Please disable adblock to use this page')

