
Webtest.app – Website Speed Test with and Without Ad Blocker - rahuldottech
https://webtest.app/
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brudgers
Recent discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21052969](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21052969)

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tyingq
Just "wow" at some of the previously tested sites:
[https://webtest.app/worst.html](https://webtest.app/worst.html)

~1000+ requests for a news story? Ouch. Is there nobody paying attention , for
example, at the Denver Post?

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aberforth123
Nobody cares, everybody just wants to monetize, while not even knowing which
of those requests result in revenue. Just load everything and see what
happens!

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Krasnol
And most of the visitors don't even know why the page is so slow. Better buy a
new device...

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k1m
This is great! A nice way to encourage people to start using an ad blocker.

I worked on a site to promote ad blocking some time ago. It runs a simple test
to see if an ad blocker is installed and recommends uBlock Origin if it
doesn't detect one.
[https://blockads.fivefilters.org](https://blockads.fivefilters.org)

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nwsm
The point is to encourage people to not have slow ad overhead on their sites

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aberforth123
The goal is both!

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noxer
Why not push web monetization? This whole "problem" is a result of the fact
that people are unable to pay for content.

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zamadatix
Even if the browser could read your mind and pay the perfect amount for
content automatically I'm betting the model would have lower overall margins
than the current model.

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noxer
Why read my mind? Users deliberately kick likes and hearts and what not all
the time. Also in most cases time show pretty good how much you valued some
content.

The margin of the current model directly correlate with marines on the
advertised products because obviously the users pay it this way indirectly.
There is no way this 3 party model can be more efficient than a 2 party model.

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un_montagnard
HN is faster without uBlock origin
[https://webtest.app/?url=https://news.ycombinator.com](https://webtest.app/?url=https://news.ycombinator.com)

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gorhill
I doubt anyone will reproduce 1.43s locally for DomContentLoaded, I do get
~250 ms on my side in Chromium's dev tools' Network pane with cache disabled
-- no meaningful difference than without uBO. I think such discrepancy should
be investigated to identify why this happens.

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aberforth123
It's also just one test, and not hundreds. I just reran it, the result is now
the other way around.

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Operyl
Interestingly, Google is slower with an adblocker. Probably has to do with the
slight overhead that uBlock Origin adds. For most sites, it’s a net positive
with all the trackers and ad networks sites load. However, for sites with
little or no trackers/ads it just adds a bit more processing time.

[https://webtest.app/?url=https://google.com](https://webtest.app/?url=https://google.com)

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pierrefar
Very neat. I built a virtually identical internal tool for Blockmetry. A
couple of tips from experience:

1\. Add other browse extensions, and you'll see a big difference between their
effects. Defaults matter a lot in this space.

2\. Compare mobile vs desktop. Getting mobile emulation to be good enough is a
bit of work, but worth it IMO.

Based on internal usage, the typical web page will load 35-45% faster with
uBlock Origin installed.

My email address is my profile if you want to compare notes or whatnot.

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tgsovlerkhgsel
The Wh metric is only based on bytes transferred according to the FAQ.

It would be much more important to measure CPU load, because it's what
actually causes physical discomfort (hot laptop, fan noise), and power
consumption that users pay for. Measuring CPU time for the page load shouldn't
be too difficult and high CPU usage is one of the biggest problems with ads.

Memory usage would also be interesting.

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aberforth123
Yeah I agree, but I have no idea where to get or even measure any metrics.

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tgsovlerkhgsel
I don't know how your setup looks. But if you have a worker process that loads
the page (and does nothing else), you could (on Linux) get the values from
`ps`, or from whatever canonical source `ps` reads from.

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onesmallcoin
I think you can force load a plugin in chromium headless with a command line
argument. Last time I checked the issue was accessing the html dom of the
extension e.g chrome-extension://blahblahblah as it only returns a blank page.
The other annoying issues I experienced and currently remain unresolved in the
latest chromium build headless mode + CDP are:

1\. Granting permissions to scopes for sites e.g geolocation, notifications in
Browser.GrantPermissions

2\. Setting a mock geolocation in Page.setGeolocationOverride I've tried
replacing the JS navigator function for geolocation, even if you grant the
geolocation permission on the site it still says that it is prompting the user

If anyone has any advice on how to resolve these issues without a virtual X
server it would be greatly appreciated. Feel free to drop me a bell @
henry@str8up.media or in a comment.

If google needs anyone to find bugs in chrome headless and CDP I need a job.

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SimeVidas
Another interesting number is the total transferred size (in MB), maybe even
the most important number since that is what people on metered mobile
connections pay for.

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NightlyDev
It just sucks that ad-blockers are so slow. Do you have a really fast page
without ads? Then using a plugin for ad-blocking will make the experience
noticeably slower, often going from no noticeable delay to "this isn't
instant". Whitelisting the page doesn't really help much either, at least not
in ABP.

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alpaca128
Adblock Plus sells whitelist entries to companies, so I wouldn't use that
anyway. I mainly block ads with the hosts file, works fine for 99% of all ads.
Although I still also run uBlock Origin to get rid of all the annoying popups
and banners as well. Now the only thing I'm missing is a filter that blocks
all videos from even loading(because turning off autoplay does not work on
many sites).

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zeta0134
Slightly off-topic, but I realized that sites which _really_ want the video to
play will start playing the video when you scroll. I believe this works
because the scroll event is considered user-triggered, and sticking the "play
video" trigger on that event means the browser won't block it.

This is gross. NoScript fixes pretty much all of these workarounds. But I
don't need to use that really; sites which autoplay video have an "x" button
in the tab, which stops the video from playing. I just use that, and move on.

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learnstats2
It would be nice to use these results see some 'good' implementation, rather
than just highlighting the worst offenders.

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aberforth123
Hackernews is a great example, or this one:
[https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html](https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html)

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vorticalbox
What's funny is if you try YouTube adblock has more requests and takes longer
than just chrome.

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aberforth123
It's because there is more room in your browser for loading thumbnails..

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thoys
Wow it takes longer with adblocker to load my website, because I don't have
ads :)

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luag
Youtube.com is very interesting, it's actually slower using an adblock.

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michelb
Many sites are slower with an adblocker. Some have a multiple second timeout
waiting for a script or ad/analytics package to never load.

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ownbusiness
Well! thanks for sharing such information

