
Mozilla fixed a 14-year-old bug in Firefox, Adblock Plus uses less memory - devNoise
http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/23/mozilla-fixed-a-14-year-old-bug-in-firefox-and-now-adblock-plus-uses-a-lot-less-memory/
======
AdmiralAsshat
Great for everyone still using Adblock Plus. The rest of us switched to uBlock
Origin and never looked back.

~~~
ssalazar
I switched back to ABP when uBlock started universally blocking Sourceforge. I
understand Sourceforge has engaged in a number of very shady practices lately,
but I need Numpy for my job and I don't have time to work around nanny
software.

~~~
dnlrn
uBlock didn't start to universally block sourceforge, they just added
sourceforge to their "uBlock filters - badware risks" list, which is justified
imo. If you don't want this behaviour, just disable the list.

~~~
kzrdude
I'm always happy with the reminder that I happened to follow a link to
sourceforge. I don't need anything there..

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9fb29947
I like how 10 years passes between comment 4 and 6 in Bugzilla:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77999#c4](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77999#c4)

~~~
logn
And this comment should be a classic:

    
    
      Peter 2001-12-01 13:07:33 PST
    
      Will this really land by Dec 11?

~~~
josteink
Developers are an optimistic breed. Hard bug to fix :)

~~~
bzbarsky
The author of comment 3 there was a manager, if I recall correctly. Which I
may not. It's been a while.

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disillusioned
ABP memory usage in Chrome made me switch to router-level ad blocking. Added
bonus: it works on mobile too. I have weird page renderings sometimes, and
whitelisting a legit site is a pain, but it's overall a huge value to off-load
the blocking to the router.

~~~
btgeekboy
Do you have any documentation on this? It's something I've been interested in
setting up.

~~~
wila
That depends completely on the router software that you use. You will need to
use a custom firmware like dd-wrt, tomato, openWRT, etcetera.

I run it here on tomato and use something similar to:
[http://www.linksysinfo.org/index.php?threads/auto-dl-
hosts-f...](http://www.linksysinfo.org/index.php?threads/auto-dl-hosts-file-
and-install.21378/)

~~~
btgeekboy
It's safe to assume I have a standard Linux system. I have an Ubiquiti
EdgeRouter now, and a few regular x86_64 always-on systems behind it I can
proxy traffic through if necessary.

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r721
July discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9809384](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9809384)

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eponeponepon
This amused me - about twenty minutes ago I'd noticed Firefox using _way_ less
memory that it usually does, but thought nothing more of it.

Jung would have something to say about synchronicity, I'm sure.

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bitwarrior
Not really a bug, more of an enhancement.

~~~
padenot
This is Mozilla jargon. Anything that is tracked in Bugzilla is a "bug". I've
opened bug in Bugzilla to change the chair at my desk, for example (I work at
Mozilla).

~~~
nandhp
> Status: RESOLVED, VERIFIED, CLOSED Content: chair

> Zarro Boogs found.

I don't know what I expected -- there's no "Other > Desk furniture" in the
products list of the public Bugzilla....

~~~
padenot
We've since switched to another system, bugzilla was apparently a bit hard to
use for non-technical people, and the new tool has better workflow management
features.

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kzrdude
Does it have a benefit on something else than ABP?

~~~
heycam
There are minor benefits without ABP. For each page/iframe that is created, we
can avoid running the CSS cascade (and share those data structures) for the UA
style sheets. It's saves something like 100 KiB per document.

If other add-ons insert a common style sheet into all documents (it's
plausible Stylish does something like this? though I've never checked) then
we'll again be able to avoid running the cascade and having duplicate data
structures for the cascade across different documents.

~~~
iSnow
I just wanted to take the time to thank you for fixing that bug. Since I keep
dozens of tabs open all the time, the memory consumption of FF has caused me a
lot of pain (the browser gets really slow if it crosses 2.5GB real RAM
consumption).

So, you just made my life better, thanks :)

~~~
heycam
Cheers!

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dragon88
I honestly use use Ghostery which blocks all trackers. It prevents a lot of
ads from loading/working because they often have to redirect to serve me the
right one (which Ghostry prevents). Waaay less of a resource suck.

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ljk
Does anyone know if it's worth switching back from uBlock for?

~~~
gorhill
I updated the benchmarks (I published first back in March) for Firefox 41 and
Chromium 45. Results: [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Firefox-
version:-benc...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Firefox-
version:-benchmarking-memory-footprint#results)

~~~
tdkl
Any info on Adblock Fast[1] ? They advertise as being lightweight with only 7
rules and I wonder how they compare to uBlock Origin (I'd still choose Origin
because of the customization options).

[1] [http://adblockfast.com/](http://adblockfast.com/)

And thank you for making browsing the Internet awesome.

~~~
anc84
It's snake oil. The 7 rules are 7 lines of many many rules. Stay clear of
anyone making such misleading marketing claims!

~~~
tdkl
Well yes, I'm aware it's highly suspicious, just didn't want any name calling.
Just wanted to see the authors opinion about it and if he ever tested it out,
or will in the future, specially if they claim such bold enhancements
regarding ABP. If anyone can comment on this topic, it's gorhill.

~~~
gorhill
Adblock Fast is like BluHell -- last time I looked into it, the seven huge
regexes were a direct import from BluHell. I ran a mini-benchmark for which I
reported the results here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10198994](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10198994)

uBlock Origin itself has higher memory footprint, but given that it blocks
more (using default settings), on average it will cause web pages to consume
less memory, so eventually with many tab opened, uBlock Origin may end up
being more efficient than Adblock Fast memory-wise.

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zurn
I don't see any percentage-wise memory savings in the article or here in
comments. How big a difference does a couple of MB per document make?

~~~
bzbarsky
Depends on the documents and how many there are.

On your typical 50-100MB web-appy page (e.g. gmail) a couple MB is a few
percent.

On about:blank, which is normally a few hundred KB, a couple MB is several
thousand percent.

So if a page has lots of subframes and those subframes don't have much in
them, you get large wins. The canonical things that have lots of subframes are
techcrunch and the like, which have "like" buttons for several different
social networks and whatnot all over them. Each of those "like" buttons is a
separate iframe.
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=988266#c7](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=988266#c7)
has some relevant numbers for techcrunch; the difference there was 300MB vs
520MB or so (which means that the page has about 100 iframes, of course).

------
addicted
I really prefer Ghostery. Gives a much better analysis of what's being
blocked, with fine grain controls, and much nicer UI.

I haven't measured the memory consumption, but I havent had any noticeable
issues so far.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
My one huge problem with Ghostery is that it doesn't appear to provide any way
to pinpoint the source of an ad. I only want to block intrusive ad providers,
but the only way to go from "see an annoying ad" to "block its provider" in
Ghostery is to play trial-and-error with potentially dozens of different
trackers, blocking and reloading one at a time until the offending ad goes
away. In ABP, you could do this with a couple of clicks.

Am I missing something?

~~~
zobzu
personally i dont wanna keep "acceptable ads" because I believe there is no
such thing. its unsollicited and always in my face => its an ads, and it
annoys me - and im not even going to buy the product behind it.

thus, i find ublock (for ex) much simpler to deal with than ghostery.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
So what you're saying is that you don't have an answer to my question, but
you're not going to let that stop you from replying.

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cheezburgler
yup, it's totally fixed now
[https://i.imgur.com/tnys5oB.png](https://i.imgur.com/tnys5oB.png)

~~~
eugeneionesco
PEBKAC in your case?

~~~
cheezburgler
I have a reasonable number of tabs open. Besides that, I don't see how this
could be my fault (except through plugins installed, but about:addons-memory
does not show anything suspicious).

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frandroid
Someone needs to get in there and do better bug prioritization...

~~~
arcameron
It could be you! ;)

[https://careers.mozilla.org/en-
US/position/ooIv1fwm](https://careers.mozilla.org/en-US/position/ooIv1fwm)

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reitanqild
Hopefully they could also get around to fix the usability bug where the back
button on the right click menu disappear if anything is selected...

~~~
kazinator
Wow, that's quite weird. Not just the back button but refresh, bookmark (star
icon), Save Page As ...

As I type this comment, I'm noticing that you get almost this same reduced
context menu when you right click on the edit box (with additional items like
Paste and Check Spelling).

Maybe the intent is that you don't unintentionally reload the page or back out
when you're selecting.

But then Backspace will navigate back regardless of whether you have a
selection, and the main navigation bar's back button also works.

~~~
Steltek
It's been that way in Firefox for as long as I can remember (user since
Firefox started). I believe the actual intent is that the right click menu is
a "context" menu and not a shortcut menu. In this, case, the context is that
you have text highlighted. Without a selection, the context is the page.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Agreed, It seems to work the same way in Chrome as well. I'm not sure what the
problem is?

~~~
reitanqild

      It seems to work the same way in Chrome as well. I'm not sure what the problem is?
    

The problem is for some of us (fast typist/clickers) it breaks consistency.

Suddenly, out of the blue, for no good reason, the user interface changes and
my plan of action fails. No big deal but it is part of death by thousand
papercuts.

The reason is so non-intuitive that people has made it all the way to
reporting it on bugzilla[0] without clear steps to reproduce..! .

A second unrelated problem with your argument: "... It seems to work the same
way in Chrome as well". For some of us FF/FF-flone users that is not a very
convincing argument. : )

[0]:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1144394](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1144394)

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reitanqild
Hopefully they could also het arpund to fix the usability bug where the back
button on the right click menu disappear if anything is selected...

