
Show HN: A website speed test tool to compare uBlock Origin with plain Chrome - aberforth123
https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.theguardian.com
======
guessmyname
YouTube sends more requests with uBlock Origin enabled? [1][2]

My theory is, without the ads, there is more space in the webview to load
video thumbnails, each item representing a video in the HTML document probably
requires a handful of HTTP requests to load and pre-fetch their corresponding
metadata. I would not be surprised if other websites react in the same way. I
hope this is the case, but I am suspicious enough that I will investigate
further how the ad-blocker affects these websites.

[1]
[https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.youtube.com](https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.youtube.com)

[2] [https://i.imgur.com/HBB4TkK.png](https://i.imgur.com/HBB4TkK.png)

~~~
SpaceManiac
This is the case. With an addon that deletes most but not all homepage items
or sidebar recommendations, YouTube does some noticeable spinning trying to
fill the space which keeps getting emptied.

------
stevekemp
You need to filter the URLs that are accepted to avoid security problems - had
you a contact address on your profile here, or on the site I'd have disclosed
this more privately.

But consider this case:

[https://webtest.app/?url=file:///etc/passwd](https://webtest.app/?url=file:///etc/passwd)

In short you should restrict URLs to protocols of `http`, `https`, and even
then you should filter based on IP. You don't want people to view
[http://localhost/server-status](http://localhost/server-status), etc.

Finally you need to make sure you avoid recursion:

[https://webtest.app/?url=https://webtest.app/?url=https://st...](https://webtest.app/?url=https://webtest.app/?url=https://steve.fi/)

~~~
aberforth123
Thanks, good find, I fixed it.

------
nwrk
Great idea. Kudos for launch. Bookmarked.

What striked me is JSHeapTotalSize, never really think the ADs are eating so
much RAM / resources (make sense). In Guardian case this accounts for 50% more
allocation.

------
thenewnewguy
Minor typo on the website: "or to proof to others they should use an ad
blocker" (should be "as proof" or "to prove").

Also, suggestion: don't require typing [http://](http://) or
[https://](https://)

------
radicalriddler
TheGuardian is such a shit site without adblock. During the Australian
election, I turned off my adblocker because "they're an independent news
source" and I wanted to support their advertisers. I got bombarded with a full
width banner at the top, and full height banner down both sides for the
national Greens party.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't hate the greens party, but god damn, my eyes.

~~~
JetSpiegel
It's much better to donate, at least the correct people get the bulk of the
money.

~~~
jeremija
My wife and I decided to donate one year. Guess what happened next? They sold
our data to their partners and we ended receiving so much spam mail in the
following few years, we couldn't believe it. These organizations generate so
much paper waste, it made us so angry we simply stopped our subscriptions. But
we had to wait until we moved out for the spam to stop.

------
codeisawesome
I'm not sure why the code isn't open source on this one. If the OP is hoping
that news websites (etc.,) will pay for this service, I wouldn't hold my
breath.

This site only highlights all the bad things happening on those sites - and
the marketing teams there have most likely already been told by their
developers what including 1 million cookies & 50 million tracker APIs will do
to the performance. They _want_ this gunk in there so that revenue targets can
be met.

So the best bet is to put this up on GitHub where folks like me could learn
from the code :-D

~~~
aberforth123
In what way do you think news sites would pay for this service? They want full
throttle ads everywhere right, not sure why this service is of any use. They
just think: the more header bidding partners putting cookies everywhere the
more money

~~~
codeisawesome
Just to be super clear, I was not trivialising the project itself! I think
it's a very cool idea, and very useful for users like me =)

I do not think it is 'not useful'. I was - not very clearly - posing a
question on what your idea was to put it into 'practice'. I.e., whether you
were hoping to turn this into a business or an open source project by posting
here =D

Merely curious! Thank you for sharing!

------
njitram
Nice way to see if EU sites are GDPR compliant, because you didn't give
consent when hitting a website those websites should not use any external tags
yet. You can see for example nos.nl or lemonde.fr are fairly clean, but
bbc.com or bild.de are not, even though there is no consent.

------
nreece
Question for the developer: any particular reason you're using Chrome with
xvfb rather than just headless. Its been stable for a while.

~~~
aberforth123
You cannot load extensions in headless chrome, so I had to jump some hoops
here.

------
phobonym
Nice, I like this.

Would be nice if there was a way to display/download all cached results. Would
be a nice dataset for visualisation or a dashboard.

------
bscphil
I found a bug: when I enter a URL into the form it seems to URLencode the
characters, but this doesn't work on the site. That is, [1] works, [2] spins
on "status: queued" forever. As far as I know I don't have any particular
settings or extensions that would cause the URL to be unexpectedly encoded.
Edit: it's _not_ doing it right now, which is weird. It was just a moment ago,
but maybe it was fixed? I had assumed the backend was down.

[1]
[https://webtest.app/?url=https://bbc.co.uk](https://webtest.app/?url=https://bbc.co.uk)

[2]
[https://webtest.app/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbbc.co.uk](https://webtest.app/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbbc.co.uk)

------
regnerba
Why does the Reddit page get bigger with uBlock Origin? From 2.73 MB on Chrome
to 8.48 with uBlock Origin.

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

~~~
danShumway
I'm noticing that DomContentLoaded, Processing Time, and Load Time are all
blank for Reddit withoutout uBO as well.

I'm going to make a mild suggestion that the author double-check their
implementation logic. Is it possible that the ad-encumbered page isn't loading
before it times out? Or is it possible that without ads the page is loading
more content?

Even showing something like a comparison screenshot at the end might help in
odd cases like this.

~~~
aberforth123
The screenshots didn't even load because the my tiny server ran out of memory
when testing Reddit.

------
merpnderp
Quite often I’m getting 2-3x the load times for ublock.

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

~~~
Mathnerd314
It's the same 7 requests, probably a transient effect. E.g.
[https://webtest.app/?url=https://news.ycombinator.com/item?i...](https://webtest.app/?url=https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21052969)
is 0.48 vs 0.5.

I don't think it lets you retest either, the first run is cached for a long
time.

~~~
nurettin
It would be very hard to retest, not just because of traffic, but also because
some websites like amazon.com will throttle you to a halt or start showing
captchas if they think you are scraping.

------
andrerm
Great work.

Without uBO, Forbes loads 151 cookies.

------
jackewiehose
[https://news.ycombinator.com](https://news.ycombinator.com) takes a second
longer with uBlock

~~~
kgwxd
That means HN is doing things the right way :)

~~~
SwiftyBug
How is it so?

~~~
dvh
Page A loads content for X seconds and Z seconds loads ads. uBlock overhead is
Y second but saves Z seconds by blocking ads. Total time with uBlock is X+Y-Z.
If page has zero ads the time will be X+Y-0 which is greater than X+0.

~~~
drusepth
Just to clarify, this is desirable because "fewer/no ads" is preferred over
"faster page load times"?

~~~
pmontra
Yes. Pages with ads are unreadable. I'm horrified every time I see friends
navigate with no adblockers. I always recommend one. I'm going to start
recommending Firefox again, as I did at the times of IE6.

------
arnley
Thanks for sharing this gem.

Did you consider computing the Speed Index? [1]

It would help assessing the performance impact these ads have.

[1] [https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/using-
webpag...](https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/using-
webpagetest/metrics/speed-index)

------
Rarok
Fun, I tried it with a regional newspapper and it doesn't shows the processing
and load time in the versiones without adblock.

Also I never realized it was SO BAD without adblock

[https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/](https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/)

~~~
aberforth123
Regarding: "Also I never realized it was SO BAD without adblock". That's part
of the problem. We techies have no idea what's happening without an ad blocker
because we all use one. This service wants to show the unseen.

------
dddddaviddddd
Excellent way to show the weight of ads and trackers, very clean side by side
comparison.

------
taf2
Interesting to see many sites load faster without uBlock because DOM content
loaded is faster... it would be nice if we could run more scientific
measurement to get a better understanding of the load time differences.

------
drenvuk
I'm stuck in a queue. more workers please, this is awesome.

~~~
bscphil
No sites are loading for me, including the one in the Show HN URL, which ought
to be cached. I think we broke the site.

~~~
aberforth123
Yes sorry, it's tough!

------
gnrlst
When I test your own site (webtest.app), it doesn't work. I was hoping for
some introspection!

~~~
alpaca128
According to other replies this was a recent change to prevent recursive calls
and attempts to access local files on the server.

~~~
aberforth123
Indeed!

------
a_imho
Not using something like ublock is simply bad hygiene.

------
NightlyDev
Adblockers in chrome are slow. Fast pages goes from having no noticeable delay
to having one. Many times the latency is not uncommon. Sure, this is only a
problem for really fast pages, but it's still really annoying.

~~~
aberforth123
Check this service, it proofs you wrong

