AdBlock Plus’s effect on Firefox’s memory usage(blog.mozilla.org)

blog.mozilla.org

AdBlock Plus’s effect on Firefox’s memory usage

https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-pluss-effect-on-firefoxs-memory-usage/

269 comments

It's not just memory overhead, it is also CPU overhead.

One approach is to write the filtering engine from scratch. It is what I did, without looking at ABP's code beforehand in order to ensure a clean slate mind.

I didn't get it right the first time, I did spend quite a large amount of time benchmarking, measuring, prototyping, etc.

Once I was satisfied I had finally had a solid code base, I went and benchmarked it against ABP to find out how it compared:

https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/wiki/Net-request-...

And for HTTPSB's numbers, keep in mind there were an extra over 50,000 rules in the matrix filtering engine (something not found in ABP).

So I think this shows clearly ABP's code can be improved.

grrowl12년 전

I think you'd see much greater adoption if you included the core HTTPSB library within an easier user interface, specifically targeted to blocking ads / ensuring privacy. At the moment it's a hacker tool that can block ads if you configure it correctly.

If that's not what you're interested in, more power to you, it's just a suggestion since the use-case isn't obvious especially to a "regular" user.

[deleted]12년 전

sspiff12년 전

As far as I can tell, HTTPSB is not available for Firefox, please fix!

I would love to use something better than ABP (in terms of performance, it does content filtering just fine), but I'm not so desperate to abandon the (warning: subjective content ahead) greatest browser of all times to lower the memory footprint of an ad blocker.

gorhill12년 전

Issue #86: https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/issues/86

Would be nice if someone forked and start to adapt to Firefox. I would of course work in concert as this would allow to identify parts of the code which is browser specific and which parts can be turned into an independent library.

idlewan12년 전

I'm betting this is not an easy task.

It however would be really awesome for HTTPSB (which I just installed on chromium and fallen in love instantly with) to be ported to firefox.

Seeing all the privacy-related features treated, by domain/site/everywhere rules, being able to block separately js/plugins/cookies (and by the way, the matrix is a great idea, a lot more useable than anything else out there)... in one extension only. Great work already, gorhill!

Justsignedup12년 전

Eh it has some default behavior quirks. Like being unable to log into arstechnica.com because it won't let that cookie get stored.

gorhill12년 전

Whitelist the "cookie" cell in the matrix, save with one click on the padlock. Now cookies will be allowed everywhere by default (except for those ubiquitously blacklisted hostnames).

Gmo12년 전

I totally agree with that.

(I did upvote the comment but I want the creator of the extension to know that more people are interested)

AJ00712년 전

Block known ad IPs and domains at the router or local level. This is what we did before adblock plus.

mkesper12년 전

And if you don't have access to that level?

alyandon12년 전

Take a look at the RequestPolicy add-on for FF. It allows fine grained control over resource requests pages are allowed to make.

the847212년 전

The beta version also supports blacklists, which brings it a bit closer to HTTPSB.

https://www.requestpolicy.com/1.0.html

keeperofdakeys12년 전

Unfortunately the developer is MIA, so the few bugs in the beta aren't going to be fixed anything soon. The most important feature of the beta is wildcard support, so you don't need to add every cloudfront sub-domain manually.

alyandon12년 전

I did not like the beta interface for RequestPolicy and I hacked in support for using regex matching for whitelist entries so CDN domains like CloudFront work correctly.

https://github.com/alyandon/requestpolicy/commits/release-0....

Caveats are:

1) I have absolutely no intentions of continuing any work on my hack. The changes I made meet my needs. Feel free to fork if you need additional features.

2) I don't pretend to be an elite javascript developer. I have no idea if my hacks are considered idiomatic javascript or not. I also make no promises that running my hacked version of this extension won't upload all your private data to a server in Russia or cause other problems like having your hard drive explode in a ball of fire.

tty12년 전

httpswitchboard looks like a very interesting extension. I haven't payed attention to what's happening with Chrome the last couple of years, but does this mean that you can finally genuinely block requests with Chrome extensions (something that has long been a problem with Chrome's Adblock extensions)?

gorhill12년 전

There is an API which can reliably block net requests: https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/webRequest

I think it has been available as a mainstream API since early 2012 (Chromium 17).

htns12년 전

Does HTTPSB have a keyboard interface? I just installed it and it seems great, but I'd prefer to not use the mouse. E.g. NoScript has Ctrl+Shift+\ to temporarily whitelist the current page's domain and Ctrl+Shift+S to open the drop-down, and the drop-down works well with the arrow keys.

gorhill12년 전

It doesn't yet. I should enter an issue for this.

Someone else at some point asked for a pull request for keyboard shortcuts (and other stuff), but at the time I thought that the extension wasn't stable enough feature-wise, and I didn't want to deal with anything which would need constant revision before the feature set stabilize. For instance, I eventually trashed the context menu code that was put in too early because of this.

But now that it definitely is approaching v1.0, it probably does make sense to address that issue.

rane12년 전

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

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

gorhill12년 전

You can select a "scope" (top-left cell in the popup) which will tells where the rules apply. You can set it to automatically create a temporary domain-level scope when landing on a web page (in Settings tab), and if you select this, I suggest you also select "Auto-delete temporary scopes".

Now any rules will apply only to that scope. For web sites you use regularly, just lock down these rules for that scope, and they will be remembered every time you visit that particular domain.

This is actually the preferred way to use the extension, but I did not make it the default currently.

rane12년 전

Thanks. But this is exactly what I meant by micromanagement.

Plus I'm afraid that strict settings will break sites I haven't visited before without me knowing they're somehow broken.

Is there a way to configure the extension to just block ads?

gorhill12년 전

Ok, I just created a setup file which you can restore from the About page which focus can be said to be "ad blocking":

https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/blob/master/stuff...

I selected the following preset lists:

- hosts-file.net/ad-servers

- someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts

- easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt

Note though that this will work best with the upcoming v 0.9.2.0 which supports almost all net request-based ABP filters (my benchmark on github was updated yesterday for that version).

In the above setup, HTTPSB has been set to work in allow-all/block-exceptionally mode, so nothing is blocked except for what appear in the above files.

Keep in mind that HTTPSB doesn't do element hiding (I see this as a separate extension.)

ak21712년 전

Thank you for putting in the effort to make this more usable out of the box. I will be all over this once the ability to use these filter lists is easy to access.

sliverstorm12년 전

I'm with this guy, I don't really want to spend much time filtering/selecting. If I can block 90% of the crap in seconds vs. 99.9% of the crap with several day's investment in customizing the filtering, I'll take 90% please.

Thanks for providing the "adblock-like" preset, that was just what I was looking for. Then from here, if/when I run into particularly horrific js, I can block it one-by-one.

kretor12년 전

This! I would like to have AdBlockPlus' UI with httpSwitchboard's backend. So I filed a request to AdBlockPlus to do that:

https://issues.adblockplus.org/ticket/488

kretor12년 전

... and AdBlockPlus developers closed the issue. One of the reasons given: "missing features [of HTTPSB] are an issue [...] (filter groups, hit statistics etc.)". One of their devs adds "They don't support element hiding, which is one of the main causes for the high memory consumption when using Adblock Plus. Neither do they support popup blocking. [...] [T]here still might be some parts where we can learn from HTTPSB. But the main reason that it is faster and uses less memory is that HTTPSB is less powerful."

gorhill12년 전

It's not easy to try to fit new code in old code, I empathize completely with that.

This is where I was at an advantage, I was writing new code to fit with new code. There are ideas though that were keys to performance breakthrough which they certainly could borrow.

losvedir12년 전

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

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

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

gorhill12년 전

I will enter your comment in issue #184, so I can keep it in mind. I think this is a good idea.

Shivetya12년 전

at one time I could not use this add on and visit cycle trader or auto trader without losing all the memory on my system.

For some odd reason it never did that on my Mac, is there a real difference between firefox osx and Windows?

gorhill12년 전

I am not aware of any problem which resemble this. You are talking about HTTP Switchboard here?

vfclists12년 전

Having all my keystrokes sent to Google is the main reason why I don't use Chrome.

Can this app guard against it, ie only send my keystrokes to Google only when I enter a Google URL?

gorhill12년 전

Well, there is a browser setting to disable that feature. But in any case, the extension can block "behind-the-scene" requests if a user choose to:

https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/wiki/Behind-the-s...

By default all behind the scene requests are allowed (or else that would break auto-update and other extensions), but you can make it block everything (except of course for those net requests which are not routed through the chrome.webRequest API).

It is quite useful to also see (and control) net requests made by other extensions.

r12e12년 전

Have you tried using Chromium[1] instead? Once I got serious with ABP/KISS Privacy/Ghostery I figured it made sense to switch from Chrome to Chromium.

And discovering Chromium-Updater the other day has plugged the only missing piece in the jigsaw, for me.

[1]http://chromium.woolyss.com/ [2]https://github.com/benbristow/Chromium-Updater/releases

NDizzle12년 전

I wanted to try your plugin, but by default I can't load:

gmail, aws cloud services panel, and another cloud provider's configuration panel.

Maybe I don't know how to use it, but what are you trying to accomplish by preventing me from loading mail.google.com by default?!

gorhill12년 전

You can set it up anywhere between blocking everything to blocking nothing. I do have a couple of set up files to help people get started, here:

https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/tree/master/stuff

By default though it comes in block-all/allow-exceptionally mode, just like NoScript and RequestPolicy.

Eventually, as usual, as time permit, I would like to have a wizard for first install which will let the user choose which setup (from the ones above) is preferred to get started.

apenney12년 전

Am I doing something exceptionally wrong? I click Restore from file in scoped rules, and then decode recipe. That gets me more json on the left (in a red box, so I assume parsing failed). I then try "Import Rules" and nothing seems to happen. The commit button at the top never allows me to click, and nothing changes.

This is using the abp setup (and a few of the others in stuff/), none of which worked.

gorhill12년 전

"Restore" from About tab. The "Restore" in the Scoped rules tab is to import/export rules only. In the About tab, it is to restore all settings.

sequoia12년 전

Please post to HN when you have some sensible default config options built in! I really want to try your tool but can't be arsed to whitelist everything one by one.

Osiris12년 전

If you read here:

https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/wiki/How-to-use-H...

There's a way to set it up to allow by default.

The plugin looks really interesting, but I wish it would give more detail about the requests that were blocked/allowed and a better explanation if I blacklist something, is that permanent or do I have to save it each time?

gorhill12년 전

All changes to the matrix are temporary by default. Click the padlock to make them permanent. At first, this might be annoying (though it is just one-click to make it permanent), but once you have all your rules for your usual sites, it's nice that all is temporary by defaults.

There is a request log in the dashboard/Statistics tab where you can see in details (full URL) what was blocked or not.

agumonkey12년 전

also breaks youtube

RobotCaleb12년 전

With HTTPSB installed do I need to continue to run adblock, ghostery, and disconnect?

gorhill12년 전

It all depends how you use HTTPSB, I can't decide for you.

For one thing, HTTPSB doesn't hide DOM elements (I consider this out of its primary purpose), so if you still want this feature, you will have to keep ABP (or whatever equivalent does element hiding).

As for Ghostery or Disconnect, they still can be useful if you use HTTPSB in a permissive way (allow-all/block-exceptionally).

You could even use HTTPSB to block nothing at all, but as a mere reporting tool (with very low footprint), to find out what the other blockers did not block, as net requests will still be reported in the matrix.

RobotCaleb12년 전

Okay, I'll spend some more time with it.

While I have your ear, can I request color blind compatibility?

http://i.imgur.com/WHA3BHw.png

I think there are red and green elements there, but can't tell which is which. Also, I don't know how to set them to red or green specifically as I can't seem them. :)

Could you maybe include a check mark and an X or some other non-color dependent means of portraying that information?

gorhill12년 전

I did enter an issue 6 months ago to make it color-blind friendly: https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/issues/52

I know nothing about color-blindness though, so I will need the input of color-blind people. If there is an option to use blue instead of green, would that work?

RobotCaleb12년 전

That would work for some. The best path would be to not solely rely on color for information representation. Add some other visual element, such as a pattern to the color, or a small icon.

I'll chime in on the issue.

webmaven12년 전

And even to the extent that color is being used to convey information, don't rely solely on hue, make sure colors are distinguishable by value as well (in the case of text backgrounds, this is sometimes a better option than a pattern).

sliverstorm12년 전

It seems to have noscript-level manipulation functionality, which I believe means "no". It appears to be able to block anything & everything, so you would just need to make sure you have the right filtering settings.

aw3c212년 전

Since everyone is talking about HTTPSB here, one wish from me. I think it would be easier to use, especially for newbies, if you would use text everywhere instead of icons.

I am also a bit confused if settings apply to the current domain only or not, some behaviour suggests they are global but I have to test this.

anigbrowl12년 전

This is my new favorite thing. It took me a few moments to 'get it' - eg sites like HN not loading by default, until I enabled them n the matrix display, but I worked it out without by experimentation very quickly and I love being able to edit preferences so fast. Well done, fantastic work.

mullingitover12년 전

This is like a commercial for forking Firefox to build highly efficient ad blocking into the browser.

It's sad that the most-demanded feature on every browser, as evidenced by plugin downloads, is ad blocking. However, all the major browsers are produced by companies with their hands in advertising, and this conflict of interest has resulted in this feature request going unfulfilled for a over a decade.

Fork 'em.

DenisM12년 전

I don't think we can block ads in mainstream browsers because ad providers will just work around the blocks. Plugins provide defense in numbers against suck workarounds, making ad blocks actually effective.

__david__12년 전

This doesn't make sense to me. Why can't ad providers work around the blocks in adblock? And why could they work around those same blocks if they happened to be integrated into the browser itself?

Take popup blocking as an example. That's integrated into the browser and has almost completely eliminated the annoying popup ad.

pbhjpbhj12년 전

>Why can't ad providers work around the blocks in adblock? //

It's not really a work around but some sites do block your [full] access and say to turn off your adblocker if you want access to the [additional] content.

That said I don't think it makes much difference to the matter at hand.

DenisM12년 전

Defense in numbers - there can be more plugins than there can be browsers. Creating a new plugin is much easier than creating a new web browser.

Besides, fewer people have installed the ad block than those who have browsers. This make for smaller incentive to develop workarounds, compared to situation where everyone has some sort of block.

Shorel12년 전

Old Opera presto had integrated ad blocking.

What it did not have, is an auto updated blacklist.

But the actual ad blocking was fast and effective.

acqq12년 전

Still my preferred desktop browser! It's also almost 3 times faster runs bellard.org/jslinux

Steuard12년 전

What business model do you envision for the web, then? Sure, my own websites are ad-free, but they're purely hobby projects and I don't feel like the (small?) income would be worth the personal discomfort of "selling out". For those who can't afford to develop and host good content for free, what's the solution?

205guy12년 전

I think this is the biggest problem in the Internet sphere right now. It has been in the backs of everyone's mind for 20 years, but with no other solution available, the Internet has been financed 100% by ads.

I often dream of a world where x% of my ISP bill is paid out in micropayments to the content providers (think about it, we pay ISPs for infrastructure that would be worthless without content, and they get all the cont for free). But that ignores actual bits, so in the end I wish there was a protocol for me to pay for the content I want, and in exchange the provider would give me ad-free content. Now imagine I could choose (or have a browser setting) what level of payment vs. ads I want on each website.

I realize it can't be that simple, the economics of the Internet (from end to end) are much more complicated.

varkson12년 전

IE contains a general purpose blocker. You just download an ad list from the Add Ons site and it does it all in browser.

BorisMelnik12년 전

I'm just gonna say this as a person who uses ABP and has not done any low level memory analysis: browsing using ABP saves me much more time and makes my browsing much quicker:

-ads take so long to load and when ABP is not enabled bogs down my browser hard core

-when watching videos I have to wait 3-20 seconds for them to load, with ABP enabled I do not have to wait at all

It consistently saves me several minutes every day. If it adds a few extra milliseconds to load some style sheets I have never, ever noticed.

SudoNick12년 전

I think this is the fourth or fifth time, in recent memory, that I've seen someone from Mozilla criticize Adblock Plus and call on its developers to make changes. ABP startup time and memory consumption were subjects I recall, and its general impact on page load times may have been as well.

I can understand Mozilla taking some interest in how addons behave, and constructive feedback on extensions is a good thing. However, ABP is the type of extension that is likely to have issues in those areas because of what it does. Which is very important to users, especially those who rely upon it for its privacy and security enhancing capabilities. It is those users who should decide whether the performance and resource usage trade-offs are acceptable. Mozilla shouldn't make, or try to make, such decisions.

The situation with ABP 2.6 (https://adblockplus.org/development-builds/faster-firefox-st..., https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=22906) might not be a case of this, but that along with the wider pattern of platform developers being more controlling, does make me somewhat concerned about Mozilla taking too much interest in extensions. I hope my worries are for naught.

nnethercote12년 전

I'm the author of the post. I was extremely careful to keep the tone of the post neutral. This paragraph sums it up:

> So, it’s clear that ABP greatly increases Firefox’s memory usage. Now, this isn’t all bad. Many people (including me!) will be happy with this trade-off — they will gladly use extra memory in order to block ads. But if you’re using a low-end machine without much memory, you might have different priorities.

If you think this post is unreasonable, I think your skin is too thin.

SudoNick12년 전

I noticed that you said that, and expected others to notice as well. I don't really think your post unreasonable. I'm just a little concerned that, even in a case of pure intentions and desire for balance, extension developers may feel pressured to make changes and end up sacrificing features or effectiveness.

Did you notice how some people here, and at your blog, proposed modifications what would trade coverage for memory consumption? Even if that would result in known filter hits being eliminated, and also without qualifying that if such an approach were adopted it should be preference based?

demi_alucard12년 전

For those who do not know, there is an EasyList without element hiding rules.

https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist_noelemhi...

With these rules firefox's memory usage only goes up from 290MB to 412MB, instead of 1.5GB for the website mentioned in the article for me.

The downside is that this list has a more limited coverage than the full version of the list.

dbbolton12년 전

If you are on a low-end machine and can't afford a larger memory footprint, you should probably be using a lighter browser in the first place, but if you really want to use Firefox and block ads, one option is to just block them through your hosts file, then the addon becomes largely unnecessary.

http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

caiob12년 전

I'd love to hear the side-effects of using Disconnect.

hbbio12년 전

Very interesting.

There might be an architecture problem here. Another solution is to use a proxy to block ads, like GlimmerBlocker for OSX. But I didn't investigate memory usage, though I tend to think it will be lower (plus have the added benefit of working simultaneously for all browsers).

andreasvc12년 전

A proxy cannot dynamically interact with the DOM, so it cannot do everything a plugin can. I think the solution is to use better datastructures in the plugin and improve the integratation of the plugin with the browser.

psykovsky12년 전

Cloudflare can, somehow...

andreasvc12년 전

Probably using Javascript, i.e., same mechanism as AdBlock Plus.

[deleted]12년 전

linux_devil12년 전

I switched from Firefox to Safari , when I found out 900 Mb used by firefox on my machine , now I know the real reason behind that .

nnethercote12년 전

That's a surprising story from a user named "linux_devil"!

Maybe it's time to try switching back?

chrismcb12년 전

Did I read that correctly? One website had 400 iframes? FOUR HUNDRED? Not 4, but 4 HUNDRED? Surely there is a better way.

mwexler12년 전

Ah, 3 words that always seem to show up together: firefox and memory and usage. I look forward to when I see that 4th word, "minimal", in there as well. Yes, I know original post is about an addin increasing memory usage, but I guess that doesn't surprise me anymore either, sadly, when thinking of firefox.

Even with the memory pain, I still (mostly) love FF.

nnethercote12년 전

It's much better than it used to be. For example, Firefox 15 made a class of very common leaks caused by add-ons impossible. Firefox 26 massively reduced the amount of memory used on image-heavy pages. And there have been many smaller improvements over the past three years, under the aegis of the MemShrink project (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink).

Shorel12년 전

My browser is fast again!

Thank you, really thank you.

vladtaltos12년 전

if 19 million people use it, why hasn't it become a feature firefox offers itself ? doesn't this mean people want some option of blocking ads ? I'm guessing this a native-integrated version will require a lot less memory...

[deleted]12년 전

kmfrk12년 전

I use the program Ad Muncher for Windows, and I've found that it sometimes becomes a humongous bandwidth hog, when I'm watching video.

So it's not just memory that can be at risk of hogging.

octo_t12년 전

are you sure its Ad Muncher using bandwidth and not, you know, the video you're watching?

kmfrk12년 전

Sure. Windows's bandwidth monitor tells me as much - and closing Ad Muncher fixes the slog.

neals12년 전

The first thing people complain about with browsers is probably memory usage. I doubt that many people actually understand what a browser actually does with that memory. I sure don't.

100mb sounds like a lot of memory for a webpage. Where does all this memory go to?

nnethercote12년 전

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

The most popular websites run quite amazing amounts of code, and JavaScript execution is usually the dominant consumer of memory.

If you want a deeper understanding, visit about:memory in Firefox you'll get a detailed breakdown of how memory is used.

nfoz12년 전

> That was true in the late 90s, but these days a browser is actually a fully-fledged programming environment that also happens to have some incredibly sophisticated multimedia capabilities: text, images, video, audio, animations, 3d graphics, etc.

Maybe I just miss the 90s, but I would much rather have the simple content browser than a "full-fledged programming environment", especially since all of that content is coming from the random untrusted intarwebs. Anyone want to write a browser engine that skips all the modern BS and just does a good job delivering mostly-static webpages?

astrobe_12년 전

Your best bet is text-based browsers: Lynx, Elinks, or mayve Emacs/W3M. On simple sites like HN, they are more or less usable.

I also sometimes wish the Web were just serving data in an easily processable format, and let the user decide what and how they are presented. Of course this would definitely and completely defeat the ads-supported scheme on which sits Internet. An ads-free Web would probably require the resources (media files, services, storage space, bandwidth, etc.) to be massively distributed among the PCs of the end-user, who are already paying for bandwidth, processing power and storage anyway. But it would also be quite inefficient as it would require equally massive fault tolerance.

DanBC12년 전

> I also sometimes wish the Web were just serving data in an easily processable format, and let the user decide what and how they are presented.

It's really sad that many people feel this is the state of the modern www. The original intention - you serve me stuff with suggestions about presentation, but my client software and OS and hardware can do what it likes with that stuff - appears to be long dead.

> Of course this would definitely and completely defeat the ads-supported scheme on which sits Internet. An ads-free Web would probably require the resources (media files, services, storage space, bandwidth, etc.) to be massively distributed among the PCs of the end-user, who are already paying for bandwidth, processing power and storage anyway. But it would also be quite inefficient as it would require equally massive fault tolerance.

I do not use ad blockers. I view ads. If I really like the site and trust their ad network I will click relevant links.

But I loathe the way some websites and apps work. Facebook on iOS opens all links in the facebook app. Apps and websites decide they will not let my zoom or rotate.

Especially hateful are the ads which take me out of a Chrome (iOS) session to open the app store. I contact owners of sites with those ads and politely tell them what happens, and then I cut and padte the URL to a list of sites that I will never ever visit again. This is as bad as the smiley ads that yell " HELLO!! ".

Advertisers seem reluctant to realise that irritating people like me ( ad tolerant) is a rwally bad move and is the reason so many peopke use ad blockers.

test123512년 전

>Advertisers seem reluctant to realise that irritating people like me ( ad tolerant) is a rwally bad move and is the reason so many peopke use ad blockers.

You're a tiny, tiny percent of users who actively chooses to view ads. Not to be insulting, but advertisers don't care what you think - the money they lose from your custom isn't worth the effort to make the change.

I don't bother blocking ads and I've never felt the need to install anything.

But the day I come across a site which I deem annoying enough, you can bet I won't hesitate for a second, and that'll just blanket block everything. As long as the advertisers play nice, I don't particularly mind. I don't care to differentiate between 'good' and 'bad' advertisers - just like how I'm not worth their time, neither are they worth mine.

GregBuchholz12년 전

Don't forget the Links browser, which started out text-only, and then added graphics:

http://links.twibright.com/

warfangle12년 전

> I also sometimes wish the Web were just serving data in an easily processable format, and let the user decide what and how they are presented.

I think we tried that approach with RSS.

nfoz12년 전

And RSS is great. What are you getting at?

diegocg12년 전

The problem is not the browser. The problem is that modern web pages use a lot of functionality, use a lot of JS libraries and thus require that "full-fledged programming environment". A browser that does not implement it will just not be able to visit modern web pages. A page such as cnn.com weights 2M - and images are just 450 KB of it. Gmail and G+ are between 7 and 8 MB.

Modern web pages are programs and many are becoming bloated, and there is nothing magical a browser can do to avoid it.

nirvdrum12년 전

The other half to this story is many web developers think the browser will magically clean up for them. I've lost track of how many sites I leave open in the background only to come back and find they're using > 1 GB RAM. I can always tell when it happens though because my laptop fan kicks on seemingly randomly.

With a bit of profiling it's usually that these sites just constantly append to the DOM. Without using circular buffers or otherwise cleaning up, eventually the CPU gets pegged doing constant GC. JS and Web development don't obviate the need for fundamentals and good programming practices.

[deleted]12년 전

userbinator12년 전

Anyone want to write a browser engine that skips all the modern BS and just does a good job delivering mostly-static webpages?

This is one thing I wish more people would try (as I am), and quite honestly don't think is as hard as the big browser vendors make it out to be; my view is that the complexity in mainstream browser engines appears mainly based on how they were designed and implemented, and not as a consequence of the web standards they need to implement. The massive numbers of abstraction layers certainly contribute, as is the notion that everything should be extremely flexible and extensible (Web standards don't change all that often, and when they do they tend to do so incrementally.) It would certainly be interesting to see the limits of how simple (in terms of lines of code, binary size, etc.) and/or fast you could make a web browser and still e.g. have it pass Acid2, which probably makes it quite usable for much of the non-webapp part of the Internet.

text, images, video, audio, animations, 3d graphics, etc.

One only has to look at demoscene productions to see that providing a rich multimedia experience doesn't necessarily require all that much in the way of computational resources, and that's partly a reason why I believe web browsers could be made vastly more efficient than the norm today.

dredmorbius12년 전

I see the problem being that there are essentially four different modalities to online content:

• Reading and discussion. Content-oriented sites. Overwhelmingly, here, Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem, and tools such as Readability, Instapaper, and Pocket are increasingly used to address this. Secondarily, content management is a problem, and my suspicion is that a new tool will emerge to displace the current browser model, either one of those mentioned or local clients such as Calibre or Zotero (a bibliographic management tool, though with some document display capabilities). Once content is rendered there's no real call to modify it dynamically. While console-mode / text browsers can be used here, I find they lack the management tools I seek. Discussion would entail some form of standard forum tool, a Usenet 2.0 type concept, ultimately, and would likely be integrated. Editing should support any full-featured local editor of the user's choosing.

• Application platforms. This is where full-featured browsers such as Chrome and Firefox appear headed. I believe they're headed for a rococo collapse -- that is, there's going to be such a degree of overembellishment of the browser that people will eventually abandon them for other, more appropriate tools, as those emerge. This has already happened numerous times in the browser space (Netscape -> Mozilla -> Firefox, MSIE -> anything else), and several times new browsers have emerged whose primary claims to fame were being lightweight and better reading experiences (Skipstone, Galeon, Firefox (initially), Chrome. Most eventually suffer from bloat.

• Commerce. This is currently handled in the browser, and is in fact a principle driver of much of the application functionality. Splitting this from other browsing activity would result in a smaller and saner platform, as well as isolation of financial transactions from other browsing, again, greatly reducing online risks. With a proper payment infrastructure, this should also greatly reduce the general security issues involved with online payments. Arguably this is already happening with the iTunes (Apple) and Play (Google) stores -- apps on mobile platforms.

• Multimedia content. Other than very brief previewing, it's almost always preferable to queue up multiple audio or video streams in an external player. My experience is that this niche is already reasonably well represented, in particular with tools such as VLC which support audio and video content, drag-and-drop queuing, playlists, playback controls, and the ability to correct for audio and video quality (levels, echo, brightness, contrast, etc.). Online players 1) are annoying in general, 2) don't allow for queuing content from multiple sites, 3) have inconsistent (and generally inadequate) controls, and 4) suffer from numerous playback, quality, and performance issues.

More: http://redd.it/256lxu

[deleted]12년 전

arikrak12년 전

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

ionforce12년 전

Define "modern BS".

crististm12년 전

What about "tons of JS just for the sake of it"?

Ever since google maps, everyone started using JS like there is no tomorrow. And what came out of it? HTML is no longer enough. Firefox doesn't give option of disabling JS (1)

(1) about:config doesn't count

vacri12년 전

When I install firefox, I only have two plugins. Flashblock and NoScript. NoScript is actively maintained and lets you filter js with all sorts of options, defaulting to 'none at all'. Most sites work either perfectly or to some degree, though some fail to provide any content at all without js.

Given how trivial it is to install the plugin, I think that counts as firefox allowing disabling js.

thristian12년 전

If you want Dillo and/or w3m, they're still available!

chris_wot12년 전

Is Dillo still going strong?

keithpeter12년 전

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8403291/dillo.png

Xubuntu 14.04 has version 3.0.3 with docs dated April 2013

You won't be logging into dropbox with dillo alas!

Mighty fast for reading and cat pictures.

code_monk12년 전

NetSurf does a pretty good job. It does well at HTML and CSS on most sites and has only very basic JS support.

Another is Dillo, although it doesn't have as good of CSS last I tried (version 3 isn't horrible though).

[deleted]12년 전

gabriel3412년 전

I tried disabling JS & cookies and whitelisting exceptions, but it was a pain. I ended up just using ghostery which is the opposite - blacklists exceptions, but with a 3rd party maintaining the list it became much better.

peterwwillis12년 전

> Anyone want to write a browser engine that skips all the modern BS and just does a good job delivering mostly-static webpages?

Over 10 years ago, someone did this with Mozilla Suite.

They called it "Phoenix". Some trademarking issues prompted them to rename it to "Firebird", but that name was also used by a popular database, so they finally renamed it again to "Firefox".

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

riquito12년 전

Firefox was never meant to deliver "mostly-static webpages" and "skip all the modern BS".

peterwwillis12년 전

Okay. If you want to get technical, they ("Phoenix developers") stripped out all the unnecessary Mozilla Suite components, stripped out a ton of browser code, then added their own code. They wanted to be feature-compatible while removing bloat.

Technically it's harder to remain feature compatible if somebody ripped out the "modern BS" from the browser, because anything put into Firefox automatically becomes a de facto web standard. But they're by and large multimedia extensions which shouldn't be considered a necessary part of displaying hypertext.

I think if people want a programmable multimedia platform, that's fine, but they should build it separate from the world wide web so the rest of us can browse the New York Times without a 500MB web browser in resident memory, nor wait for the browser to stop the millions of operations it needs to reload the page due to all the ridiculous and unnecessary crap in the background.

Instead of forking the browser to strip out or redesign the unnecessary crap, i'm suggesting we take pruning shears to Firefox itself, lest we get yet another new tool that tries to replace yet another bloated, antiquated piece of crap.

kalleboo12년 전

You don't need a new or changed browser to do any of that. Firefox still renders plain-text HTML that contains nothing more than <h1>, <p> and <a> just fine, blazing fast and I bet it doesn't need much RAM either.

But someone needs to create that content. And you're not getting it from the New York Times unless they can put flashy ads and interactive graphics that entices the majority of the users on the net (who actually enjoy the multimedia platform version of the web).

hollerith12년 전

>Firefox still renders plain-text HTML that contains nothing more than <h1>, <p> and <a> just fine

Not as well as it used to!

Specifically, in the browsers of the 1990s you could "scroll while dragging": i.e., if you start dragging to select some text and you reach the bottom of the window, the window would scroll, allowing you to select more text than just what was on the screen when you started dragging. But at least in Firefox, that does not work anymore. (More precisely, you cannot scroll down although if you start dragging at the end of the selection, you can scroll up.) In other words, browsers have gotten so complicated that even an organization like Mozilla that spends millions of dollars a year on browser development cannot preserve all of the conveniences users used to enjoy for handling text.

My main response, though, is that the browser organizations (Mozilla, Google, MS and Apple) could have balanced the interests of content producers and content consumers instead of their giving content producers (and web-app developers, and marketers) almost everything they want like they have done. It's not as if the New York Times would have withdrawn from the web if the things they could do with code and with stylesheets were more limited.

ben0x53912년 전

This works for me right now on firefox 29.

[deleted]12년 전

CJefferson12년 전

Such a webbrowser would be unable to render a large chunk of the internet, which doesn't sound overly useful.

I'm sure if you dug up a copy of an early netscape version it would be very fast on a modern machine, while failing to render most of the internet, if that's what you want.

dredmorbius12년 전

Such a webbrowser would be unable to render a large chunk of the internet, which doesn't sound overly useful.

It wouldn't be able to render a large chunk of the Internet as designed, which, frankly, with 1106 local custom stylesheets applied to fix a huge range of crap and annoyances, sounds very useful and desirable.

Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem.

http://redd.it/256lxu

clarry12년 전

> Many people think of a browser as a tool for displaying text and pictures, with maybe a bit of JS code and some CSS effects on the side. That was true in the late 90s [..]

It still is for many of us who complain about browser (and web content) bloat. We are on the web for text and pictures, primarily. The things we do online hasn't changed much since the 90s. Having sophisticated multimedia capabilities is irrelevant when we're in it for the content that matters.

Crito12년 전

Exactly. What makes up the bulk of our internet browsing?

Pages like this: http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/ ?

Or pages like HN or wikipedia articles?

We seem to be trading resources for capabilities that we rarely leverage for any tangible benefit.

GregBuchholz12년 전

The whole personal computing ecosystem as it stands today seems like a huge failure of imagination.

http://www.ultratechnology.com/scope.htm

hollerith12년 전

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

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

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

bru12년 전

>and JavaScript execution is usually the dominant consumer of memory.

That's forgetting the DOM, which is often the actual cause for slowness & memory consumption, but gets far less spotlight than JavaScript. This is also a reason why a framework like react.js is so interesting: it circumvents the real DOM when computing (on a virtual DOM), and only applies the end result.

nnethercote12년 전

In my experience, JS memory usage is nearly always much higher than DOM. For example, my current Firefox session has 16 tabs open and ABP enabled. JS memory usage is over 600 MiB, whereas DOM memory usage is only 120 MiB.

VLM12년 전

"The first thing people complain about with browsers is ..."

They changed the browser UI, either the browser devs or the site devs via stupid javascript tricks (messing with scrolling, etc). I got driveby download powned and my CC info stolen and five spam toolbars in the UI I can't get rid of. There are too many spammy ads. They make is as hard as humanly possible to use bookmarks to encourage the use of a search engine every single time you go to a site thus monetizing ad views. Typosquatters. "Journalism" sites with one line of the article per page of spam. Spam "answer" websites.

Memory is way, way down the list.

mschuster9112년 전

> They make is as hard as humanly possible to use bookmarks

Chrome has a "star" button right in the address bar, FF and IE have Ctrl+B to create a bookmark.

And both Chrome and FF have a pretty good auto-complete in the address bar (I just have to type "ne" to get Hacker News, "ma" for google mail, "youp" and "yout" for video streams, etc pp).

People vastly underestimate the power of keyboard shortcuts. I work as a freelance consultant/support guy and everyone is surprised how fast I work with even the slowest computers. Most can't believe how much time one can save by knowing at least Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V, Alt-Tab and Ctrl-Tab.

GilbertErik12년 전

I use mostly the same functionality that you describe here, with the exception of "youp". What does that autocomplete to... Ohhhh, I see what ya did there.

Two words for you: Incognito Mode

Curmudgel12년 전

> Chrome has a "star" button right in the address bar, FF and IE have Ctrl+B to create a bookmark.

The Classic Theme Restorer add-on for FF allows you restore the star button to the address bar. On FF, Ctrl-D bookmarks the current page, while Ctrl-B opens a list of bookmarks.

icebraining12년 전

I don't get it; I'm on FF 29 without that addon, and I have a star button on the bar (not in the address text input, but on the same bar). What's the point of the addon?

01Michael1012년 전

The point is the star button is not in a convenient location in FF 29... I find have to search for the star button now when need to bookmark something. I guess it made to much sense to have right in the address bar so they moved it... The Classic Theme Restorer may be in my near future.

UPDATE: I used the Customize feature to move the star button just to the right of the address bar and that is good enough for me.

sphink12년 전

What's the use of an uncategorized bookmark? I always drag the url into a bookmark folder in the toolbar (which I always have open; apparently come people hate that.) For uncategorized stuff, well, I guess that's why I have 300+ tabs open right now...

And Tree Style Tabs. Cannot live anymore without TST. That really ought to be in the core. Especially since it's sometimes a little buggy, though that may be because FF is changing underneath it.

Oddly, I'm on Nightly, and the star button is to the right of my url bar. I don't remember moving it back there, and I don't know why I would, since I never use it.

Ok, it's gone now.

Nursie12년 전

Definitely. In a browser-on-pc setting, who even cares about memory any more? We have loads of it.

pdpi12년 전

Tons of people. There's all the people using old computers, because they're still plenty good (except when using applications written by people who think they don't have to worry about memory), and all the people on shoestring budgets using cheap computers that are for the most part good enough (except when using applications written by people who think they don't have to worry about memory).

sentenza12년 전

Also, people who let their machine and browser rund 24/7. I'm currently stuck with an 8GB machine because I hit the maximum RAM supported by the mainboard and I don't have the time to go through a full productive machine migration right now.

So I restart my browser every 48 to 72 hours to reduce the memory footprint (which is one of those clunky "hacks", but it still works).

clarry12년 전

If you think everyone or even most people out there want to upgrade their computers every couple years, and go for models with lots of RAM in them.. I'm sorry, you're wrong. Some geeks might have 16G or 32G but that's it.

Besides, whatever happened to Web browsing being a lightweight activity accessible for everyone even on his grandma's old PC?

Nursie12년 전

Even a chromebook has multiple GB of RAM now. Yes, a lightweight browser on old machines is desirable, but everything has had more than enough RAM for an extra 100MB for ABP for multiple years.

Crito12년 전

The Chromebook Pixel I'm sitting behind right now has 4GB. I find it frequently insufficient for Chromes needs. I bought it a year ago; the websites that I use give me the same sort of content that they did a year ago.

nnethercote12년 전

And who would want to use a browser anywhere other than a PC, right?

Nursie12년 전

We appear to be talking about ABP on desktop firefox, no?

nnethercote12년 전

It's true; my comment wasn't fair.

Returning to your original point: I've been working on Firefox's memory consumption for about three years now. There are quite a few people who take your viewpoint. But there are also plenty of people who care very deeply about memory usage. Some of this makes sense, e.g. from people who are on low-end machines. But some of it is less rational... there is a subset of people for which memory consumption is almost a moral issue, and excessive usage indicates the general decay of western civilization, or something like that.

gcp12년 전

The problem surely applies just as well to ABP on mobile Firefox?

__david__12년 전

> In a browser-on-pc setting, who even cares about memory any more?

I do. I have 16GB of RAM (the max for my computer) and have 3GB of swap used. About 8GB of that is Firefox, and I (obviously) run more than just a browser on my computer.

nextw33k12년 전

I once read an explanation of memory usage.

It boils down to images, if you think about it a PNG file is small but when you decompress that to a native bitmap for rendering to a screen, you've suddenly consumed a lot of space. A lot of applications render using the CPU and pass the data to the GPU to display.

Now look at a typical page with images, flash (with images inside) all of the scroll and developers that don't optimise their images and then 100MB of data for a single page isn't really a lot.

Plus memory usage is the wrong metric, I don't really care how much RAM my applications use, I care about how responsive they are. Firefox can use all my RAM if I get great page load times and my other applications don't suffer.

Omniusaspirer12년 전

It's pretty rare that I want an application to use less ram these days, if anything I wish more programs would take full advantage of it.

userbinator12년 전

Firefox can use all my RAM if I get great page load times and my other applications don't suffer.

if anything I wish more programs would take full advantage of it.

If every single application behaved like it owned all the memory on your machine, you would have a pretty horrible experience as they'll be basically fighting over what's available and likely hitting the swapfile. On the contrary, I do wish developers would care more about the memory footprint of their applications since they are sharing with all the others. Looking at it this way, optimising performance by using more memory aggressively (and thus reducing the amount of memory other applications can use) seems like a horribly greedy and antisocial way to behave, and thus it makes sense to use as little as feasible to give good performance.

(I'm assuming that the use case here is a browser that you have open along with other applications; if you only have a browser running, then it doesn't matter as much.)

iopq12년 전

I have 16 gigs of RAM. I'd love to see every program use as much RAM usefully as possible. I don't want programs to write temp files to the drive. I want things to be done in RAM as much as possible to avoid wearing out the SSD.

In fact, every application DOES behave like it owns all of the RAM on the machine. This is what virtual address space does, it's pretending that each program has access to any place in the memory.

clarry12년 전

I have 1 gig of RAM. I'd love to see every program not waste tens or hundreds of megabytes not doing anything useful with it. I don't want programs to cause heavy swapping and slowdowns, I don't want them to crash because they ran out of memory. I want things to be done reasonably efficiently to allow me to do more with the amazing computing power I did not have fifteen years ago, with a better UX.

Sadly, a lot of current software does behave like it owns all of the RAM on the machine. But modern browsers are particularly bad, and it doesn't help that you need the web for so many things today. With browsers I'm not given much choice.

> This is what virtual address space does, it's pretending that each program has access to any place in the memory.

No, not at all. It's just handing control over to the operating system so paging can be handled transparently and programs can't overwrite each others' memory. Programs still have to acknowledge and respect the fact that memory is a finite resource, and they can't have all of it. That's how it has always been, a virtual address space doesn't change the fact.

nnethercote12년 전

This discussion sums up one of the great challenges for browser vendors -- satisfying users with wildly different hardware.

kalleboo12년 전

> I have 1 gig of RAM.

Why do you torture yourself like that when another 4 GB costs $15?

eropple12년 전

You assume his computer is new enough to support more than 1GB.

vacri12년 전

If the computer is that old, then the user is an outlier and not the target audience for the modern major browsers. Better off finding a niche browser.

clarry12년 전

Actually my computer is only four years old, and supports up to 2GB of RAM.

It is hard to find a working niche browser when Mozilla and Google are doing everything to make sure the web depends on their behemoths' complexity. They are pushing for the Web Platform. They are constantly adding new features.

I used to use Links 2 as my primary browser until about a year or two ago. I would have preferred to keep using it (actually I still do, but it's no longer primary), but one day, a few years ago, Google said let's kill IE6. I can't remember the date. But I know web devs had a party and since that day, the amount of Javascript on the web has skyrocketed, and it's gone from an optional "experience enhancer" to a requirement in many cases. So I'm not given much choice.

But this isn't just about me personally; I could buy a new computer today if I wanted to. What people have pointed out elsewhere in the comments is true -- there are people who still have old computers, much older than mine. And people (parents too) who cannot afford much else besides aging second hand machines.

userbinator12년 전

What irks me the most about this whole "web must move forward" mentality is that machines that would otherwise be perfectly usable for the sorts of basic tasks one used to be able to do even without these new web technologies (i.e. read email, news, etc.) are being obsoleted and scrapped by people buying newer, much faster hardware --- only to be used just for those same basic tasks again.

Omniusaspirer12년 전

Is that really a bad thing though? These old PC's are extremely wasteful with electricity relative to newer ones, so how much money are people really saving? People are so quick to ignore the ongoing costs and obsess over the immediate.

Basic web browsing/word processing is incredibly cheap to do right now in a new PC (sub $200 sans peripherals for the absolute newest hardware). In my opinion, these are machines that will handle web tasks for at least the next 10 years barring some huge shift that I cannot foresee.

twistedpair12년 전

This the is most cogent breakdown of what really happens in a browser. http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/internals/howbrowsers...

insky12년 전

Great question. Does that encompass the assets on the page? The recent cache, lookahead?

I'm always staggered on the flip side that serving a web page using something like XYZ CMS can use a staggering 50MB or more for one page load without caching.

Bizarre when you consider that you could get a small encyclopedias worth of text on a floppy disk.

Too many websites are drowning polar bears...

[deleted]12년 전

nhebb12년 전

I'm surprised AdBlock is so popular. I tried it a few years ago and noticed the sluggishness immediately. I know it's not a feasible alternative in everyone's opinion, but if you're running a low end machine and want to block the most pernicious ads (flash, multiple external javascript, etc.) then Firefox + NoScript is the way to go.

svantana12년 전

The killer feature of ABP is: no Youtube ads. Is there any other way to achieve that?

bru12년 전

`/etc/hosts`-blocking the ads works fine for youtube. See the list at http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero/

allyant12년 전

Doesn't block them here.

Sevores12년 전

ClickToFlash: http://hoyois.github.io/safariextensions/clicktoplugin/

mhaymo12년 전

Presumably if you have a slower internet connection the performance cost of injecting stylesheets is offset by the reduction in how many images/flash banners/etc. you have to download.

insky12년 전

I used to run a 700MHZ powerbook, and the fan used to whir away. One day I realised that having Firebug running wasn't helping! But I foolishly hadn't even considered it, as I was so used to running the extension. Adblock Plus I pretty much always install too, so would just think it was normal. It still feels much better than running the adverts!

I did try noscript for a while, but I got fed up having to turn it on for sites that just failed to work without JS, and got bored moaning about it.

gerbal12년 전

Many of the sites with the most pernicious ads require JS to function, so NoScript isn't really that effective if you're going to, say, stream the latest episode of Game of Thrones.

FedRegister12년 전

That's why you only allow the CDN hosting the videos to run JavaScript and disallow the ad network hosts from running JavaScript. Best of both worlds - you get your video stream but never have to run the ad network JS.

alipang12년 전

Anyone knows if this also affects Chrome? I have Chrome saying Adblock is using 126MB of memory, but if there are giant stylesheets injected elsewhere that might no be reported fully in the Chrome task manager.

gerbal12년 전

As a chromebook user (with 2gb of ram) Adblock plus is routinely the chief culprit for slow downs. I've found it using 400mb of ram with sites like youtube and facebook open.

[deleted]12년 전

hypron12년 전

Check out chrome://memory-redirect/

graylights12년 전

Some sites have tried gimmicks to block adblock users. I wonder now if they'll make thousands of empty iframes.

artursapek12년 전

Heh, not sure slowing down your own site for a reason unknown to most visitors is going to help your bottom line.

Silhouette12년 전

At the risk of stating the obvious, if your site is ad-funded then annoying users who don't see your ads so they go away and don't come back is a win. If they bitch about it to their friends who also wouldn't see your ads and those friends don't visit in the first place, it is an even bigger win.

Omniusaspirer12년 전

I'm not so sure this is "obvious". It presumes that those people will never refer anyone who would watch your ads, and also that search engines won't down rank you in results based on the number of people bailing from your site instantly/avoiding clicking on it.

aranjedeath12년 전

If you've bought into the lexicon of marketing it is. They're stealing revenue from you.

If you haven't, you're an asshole and you're fucking your users for no reason at all (ads are no reason).

Silhouette12년 전

I agree the position I suggested is only a plausible assumption rather than a self-evident truth. Even so, I think it's a reasonable premise. Most people aren't going to use an ad blocker and then immediately leave your site just because of some related message, so I don't see the search engine issue as much of a danger. You might lose a few people who might have clicked on your ads if someone hostile spreads the word around, but firstly I doubt many people are really going to do that either (do you leave a web site and then immediately post on your blog/Facebook page/Twitter feed that "Site X Sucks!!!11!", really?) and secondly even if they do then I suspect the odds of converting anyone they tell who acts on that information are very low.

artursapek12년 전

This assumes you gain zero benefit from a network effect, which is rarely the case.

Silhouette12년 전

No, it only assumes that you don't gain a positive net benefit from a networking effect in a network where people use ad blockers and then get upset and storm off your site if you do something about it. In the absence of data to the contrary, that doesn't seem like an unreasonable assumption.

dfc12년 전

"Network effect" not "networking effect": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

Silhouette12년 전

Unless you're building something like a social network or marketplace site, that specific kind of network effect seems unlikely to matter very much.

dfc12년 전

It seemed like you were confused about the term and or the correct use of the term. The term is "network effect" not "networkING effect." I am not invested in the argument one way or the other. I just wanted to point out how to use the term.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=network+effect...

gcp12년 전

I noticed that AdBlock now offers to block those as well.

dcc112년 전

http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero/

bru12년 전

I switched from ABP to this hosts file a few months ago and I have zero regret. My browser's faster, lighter and ads are blocked just as well as with ABP.

I actually even started splitting my hosts file: the layout is

    /etc/hosts                ('compiled' version)
    /etc/hosts.d/
    /etc/hosts.d/aaa-warning  (warning reminding me to run `update-hosts` instead of modifying /etc/hosts. Appears atop the compiled file)
    /etc/hosts.d/adblock      (that website's hosts file)
    /etc/hosts.d/base         (original system hosts file)
    /etc/hosts.d/dolead       (work-related file for development)

And I have the following functions in my .bashrc file:

    function update-hosts() {
        cat /etc/hosts.d/* > /etc/hosts;
    }

    function update-adblock() {
        curl http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero/hosts -o /etc/hosts.d/adblock 2> /dev/null
        update-hosts
    }

So if I want to update "adblock" (it is obviously an improper name) I simply do `sudo update-adblock` and if I change another file (mostly `/etc/hosts.d/dolead`) I'll just run `sudo update-hosts`.

Works wonders.

migbac12년 전

I made a simple script that merges, and removes duplicates from different sources: https://gist.github.com/louima/878171fc67d797cfcef4

pid112년 전

Interesting and thanks for sharing. I've been using https://gaenserich.github.io/hostsblock/

barrkel12년 전

Most of my adblock stuff is CSS based. I use element hiding helper to figure out which bits to kill. I have hundreds of these custom rules.

walls12년 전

To be pedantic: That's not blocking, it's just hiding. They have vastly different implications.

spyder12년 전

To be pedantic: It's blocking from displaying it but not from the downloading.

userbinator12년 전

If you want to pull hosts files from multiple sources, you may want to consider sort'ing and uniq'ing to remove duplicates.

TarpitCarnivore12년 전

Have you been able to block stuff like Tynt, and other copy/paste triggered JS stuff?

bru12년 전

I was not aware of Tynt, but I believe it's well blocked.

I just looked at the adblock-hosts file, and 'tynt' appears several times. One of those lines is commented with a link to an article about tynt[0]. I tried copy-pasting from The New Yorker and TechCrunch (who, as claimed by the author of the article, use tynt), and both times there was no crap appended.

0: http://daringfireball.net/2010/05/tynt_copy_paste_jerks

TarpitCarnivore12년 전

Thanks, I may try this out and see if I can move over my few custom blocked sites that implement this stuff.

eli12년 전

http://www.tynt.com/opt_out

throwaway776712년 전

Interesting, my experience with hosts files has been that they do not block ads nearly as well as ABP. A lot of the ads I see are served from the same host as the content. ABP also blocks things like youtube ads that I don't think can be blocked at the DNS level.

I'd love to move the ad filtering out of my browser though, either into a proxy like privoxy or DNS filtering, if it worked well.

mp3geek12년 전

Host files are very limited, and when you start dealing with anti-adblock scripts and other css/js scripts on some sites it falls apart. Basically hosts file was great 10+ years ago when the Web was new(ish) and Adblock was only used by a few. Now we're dealing with CSS, objects, subrequests, first party ad/tracking scripts.

With all the features Adblock Plus gives us, far far more than just blocking xx and yy domains like in a hosts file... Why not just use the extension? Let's leave the host file to the history books.

userbinator12년 전

ABP is filtering content that's already been retrieved over the network and read into the browser. With hosts, the blocked content never makes it into my machine, which saves bandwidth.

I think using both is better than either one alone. A hosts file to quickly remove most of the unwanted stuff, and ABP to finish off the rest that does get through.

gorhill12년 전

Regarding ABP, there are two kind of filters, the net request filters and the DOM content filters.

The net request filters do prevent net requests from being made.

throwaway776712년 전

I thought that was only the chrome version, since google does not want to implement features to allow adblockers to stop requests.

Firefox does support it, and I know that in the past adblock did stop the requests rather than hide elements.

Rusky12년 전

Chrome has added an API to block requests: https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/webRequest

nitrogen12년 전

Are you sure that the requests are still made?

ElongatedTowel12년 전

That doesn't hide the blocked elements though.

Litost12년 전

Thanks, i was using this: http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/ in a similar fashion to described in here: http://box.matto.nl/dnsadblok.html but will look into this one as well.

math0ne12년 전

I like this as well, even works great for windows 8 IE which there is no ad block for otherwise, but sometime I need to see ads and then switching is not worth the hassle. I've been thinking of developing a system tray hosts file switcher for this purpose. You think anyone else would use it?

aidos12년 전

I'd tried this in the past but my machine slowed to a crawl. I guess it was to do with the algorithm used for handling the list of hosts (this sounds like a job for a bloom filter).

I've just tried the list you provided and it seems to be ok. Will try it for a while to see how I get on.

bru12년 전

A quick dive brought me to glibc: seems like everything is done in `resolv/gethnamaddr.c`. Look for `_PATH_HOSTS` mentions: it is defined as "/etc/hosts/". The parsing seems done by the function `gethtent`. However it returns a single `hostent`...

I'll try to understand it tonight.

userbinator12년 전

It's a brute-force linear search. _gethtent() returns one line from the hosts file at a time, the loop itself is in _gethtbyname2(). It opens and parses the hosts file every single time. If I were asked to improve this, I'd probably open and parse the file only once, reparsing when the file's been updated, maybe use an on-disk cache file. Second change would be to use a hash table. I don't think anything as sophisticated as a Bloom filter is necessary unless you have truly huge hosts files.

Since gethnamaddr.c appears to be BSD-licensed I'm willing to bet that 99% of all OSs out there (including Windows) are going to have similar if not identical code.

bru12년 전

I see. Thank you!

There's a few packages that take a serious approach at adblock-through-hosts-file, including hostsblock[0], linked below. The cost of the systematic linear search is mitigated by the use of a DNS caching daemon, such as dnsmasq or pdnsd.

Indeed a Bloom filter would be overkill, and I'd rather avoid false positives!

0: http://gaenserich.github.io/hostsblock/

thegeomaster12년 전

It'd be interesting to dive into parts of e.g. Linux source to see how it tests domains against the hosts file. It probably isn't doing anything as clever as Bloom, though, but who knows...

joeblau12년 전

This is great. I just implemented it and I can already tell that my web experience is going faster.

bithush12년 전

My primary computer is a laptop from 2008 with a 2.5Ghz Core 2 Duo and other than a 1 second delay in startup I don't notice any performance degradation in general use compared to running without ABP.

Currently this machine has been up for 3 days and 17 hours and Firefox has been running the whole time and it is using 303MB with 4 tabs open one of which is the Daily Mail (don't judge!) which is an extremely busy page. This is perfectly acceptable in my opinion. I only have 4GB RAM which by todays standards in not much either. Obviously reducing the memory footprint is great but I can't say it has ever been a problem I have ever noticed.

On a side note the past few updates to Firefox have improved performance a lot. I am really impressed by how much quicker the browser is, especially with Chrome seeming to just get slower and slower with each update.

probably_wrong12년 전

> I only have 4GB RAM

I've also seen this in some other comment, so I think it's worth pointing out: if you have a desktop computer then yes, it's ok. However, there are also netbooks and notebooks around with a lot less memory than that. Tablets, while not currently one of Firefox markets, are also commonly seen with less than that. Lots of parents with second-hand computers, too, which haven't been touched in a while because it "just works".

The overall attitude towards hardware is apparently "use it for two years, then throw away and get a new one", and yet underpowered computers surround me in a 5:1 ratio. I sometimes have to install plain old versions of software (Office '97 comes to mind) because the new ones provide 5% new features at the cost of half your memory.

Maybe everyone else has techie friends that only care about the latest and shiniest, or maybe the rest of the world is rich enough to throw away perfectly good hardware just because they feel like it. But from my experience (as biased as it is), 4Gb is not an "only" situation.

icebraining12년 전

In my experience, Firefox uses less memory on systems with less RAM. My laptop only has 2Gb, and Firefox runs fine, even if on my work laptop it can reach 2.5Gb.

And I'm not shy about using tabs either, I often have many dozens open.

Donzo12년 전

You guys: you've got to stop using this.

You're missing important messages from sponsors.

bambax12년 전

Wouldn't the solution involve allowing plugins to manipulate the content of a page before it is parsed by the browser?

There used to be a proxy adblocker that did that, but I don't think it works anymore.

The Kindle browser uses a proxy to pre-render pages on the server in order to lighten the load of the device.

Could AaaS (Adblock as a service) be a viable business? I think I'd pay for it.

Cthulhu_12년 전

> Could AaaS (Adblock as a service) be a viable business? I think I'd pay for it.

It probably could, however I'm sure it would be shut down quickly by advertisers and parties showing ads - after all, you're offering a service to remove their source of income. Unless you'd funnel part of your subscriber's income back to the advertisers, based on whose ads you block. But I'm sure it'd end up being too expensive for the consumer and too much of a hassle for the one offering the service.

Not to mention you'd force your users to funnel all of their internet traffic through your servers, and it wouldn't work with encrypted pages (which large parts of the internet is moving towards)

__david__12년 전

> It probably could, however I'm sure it would be shut down quickly by advertisers and parties showing ads

What legal leg would they have to stand on? There's no law that prevents me ripping out the ads of magazines that get delivered to me…

TheLoneWolfling12년 전

The same one that allows them to sue people for scraping their website.

Tech laws are absurd.

joosters12년 전

Privoxy - http://www.privoxy.org/ does just this and works very well when configured properly. It's also one of the few ways to reliably block ads on iOS apps.

Eiwatah412년 전

You do have some information in the browser you can't get to from the outside. For example, the filter with the most hits for me is "@@||192.168.$xmlhttprequest", which whitelists XMLHttpRequests to 192.168.*. A proxy can't really tell the source of a HTTP request. But that kind of thing is sometimes the only indicator telling the difference between an ad and useful content.

SixSigma12년 전

I would recommend Privoxy rather than adblock. I chose it because it can be used with any browser rather than needing to be a plugin and have had great results with it. As a bonus I have it running on a virtual server and use an ssh tunnel on any system I end up using. This gets me round filters and installing things other than ssh. So if I am using my Android phone on free wifi, I know I'm not being dns hijacked or under HTTP MITM attack.

http://www.privoxy.org/

andreasvc12년 전

I tried switching to Privoxy the other day. You have to manually convert AdBlock lists to their configuration format, so it's less convenient. On top of that, some sites no longer worked and browsing generally felt slower. I think in the end doing the filtering in a native (C) program is the way to go, but right now it's not comparable to how hassle-free ABP is.

joosters12년 전

Yeah, the config is horrible IMO. A packaged privoxy install with ABP-comparable rules would be very useful.

I've never tried converting ABP rules into privoxy, but I did write a crude perl script to grab Ghostery's blocks and convert them into privoxy config files.

Zirro12년 전

I found these while configuring Privoxy a few weeks ago:

GNU/Linux: http://andrwe.org/scripting/bash/privoxy-blocklist

OS X: https://github.com/skroll/privoxy-adblock

Scripts to convert Adblock-filters to the Privoxy-format. They have worked well so far.

mixedbit12년 전

A drawback is that a proxy won't be able to filter HTTPS traffic.

Silhouette12년 전

That depends on the proxy. Systems that effectively MITM your own network's traffic have been around for some years now. All you need for outbound connections is to install an additional certificate in your browser so the proxy can act a trusted partner for HTTPS.

I don't know whether anyone has made such a proxy for use in the kind of situation we're talking about here, however.

ethana12년 전

Adguard does that. Been beta testing it. One adblock to rule them all kinda thing.

joosters12년 전

However you can block specific HTTPS sites with privoxy. Admittedly this isn't very fine-grained but I use it to block a lot of crummy HTTPS ads and trackers.

rjaco3112년 전

uh? you can totally filter HTTPS with a proxy, especially with a local one. Either use the option to activate the dump of you keys on disk (a one-liner on every browser) and point the proxy to that file, or just break the SSL in 2 and rely on the proxy for the actual cert check.

SixSigma12년 전

"privoxy" not "a proxy"

nly12년 전

So is there any insight as to why? My guess, without looking at the code would be the regex engine allocating millions of NFA graphs.

nnethercote12년 전

Nope. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=988266#c20 has a detailed breakdown of the style-sets memory usage.

maaaats12년 전

> Many people (including me!) will be happy with this trade-off — they will gladly use extra memory in order to block ads.

Well, for me the whole point of blocking ads is because they are often big flash things that hog cpu and memory. If ABP is no better, then most of the reason is gone. I'd actually like to view ads to support more sites.

m_eiman12년 전

Same here; I stopped using ad blockers a long time ago since click-to-plugin performs the essential function they were providing for me. Perhaps I'll reconsider when "HTML5" ads get more annoying/use more resources.

baby12년 전

the point for me is the visual noise, not the memory that ads consume. Actually, normal users are used to the lag, they don't see it as much as we do. You can take a look at consoles that have run games at 30fps for decades and nobody complained.

mschuster9112년 전

I don't care about the "visual noise" of normal/banner-type ads - the real problem are those fucking layer ads with confusing icons (the X is the left one, the maximize button the right one), so if you want to read the content, first find out which type of layer ad it is, try to spot the 2x2px hotzone for the close button and THEN read the content.

People install adblockers because too many idiots became too fucking greedy and ruined ads for everyone else!

cookiecaper12년 전

Completely agree. I'm usually OK without an adblocker until I wander over to Phoronix.

orclev12년 전

Exactly, they had their chance, and they abused the privilege, so now we've taken it away.

wutbrodo12년 전

Tell me about it man; I found that food was getting kind of expensive at some of the restaurants I frequented so now I just dine-and-dash, several times a week. Restaurants as a whole had their chance to charge me for food, they abused it, so I took that right away.

/s

simoncarter12년 전

I can’t figure out if you’re making a sarcastic point in rebuttal against orclev, or, because the analogy is so bad, taking the piss out of people who would use that analogy.

__david__12년 전

> the point for me is the visual noise…

Yes! And the cognitive noise. I find it literally impossible to read text if there's some blinking ad nearby. Before Adblock I'd have to put my had up to the screen to block the animation so that I could read the article text in peace.

vacri12년 전

You used to be able to hit ESC to stop animated gifs from cycle, but they took that functionality out (it was a benign side-effect that 'wasn't in the spec', so it was removed) :/

walden4212년 전

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

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

wutbrodo12년 전

> Well, for me the whole point of blocking ads is because they are often big flash things that hog cpu and memory.

If you don't want to screw publishers out of compensation for their product but also don't want Flash running arbitrarily on your browser, change your plugin settings to click-to-play (I know Chrome has it but I'm pretty sure Firefox does too). It has the added benefit (for me) of being able to open most video streams in a new tab the way I do with every other article and then consume it at my leisure later.

nnethercote12년 전

You do save some memory and CPU usage, but it appears that the cost is usually higher.

You can disable ABP on particular sites. I was going to suggest doing that for sites you frequently visit that don't have ads... but I just did some quick testing and it doesn't seem to change the memory usage at all.

chrismorgan12년 전

I would like to see a lighter blocking list—one that doesn’t try to be absolutely comprehensive, but just focuses on the 95% of ads that can be fixed at 10% of the cost (actually I think it’d be more like 99% at 0.1% of the cost).

Groxx12년 전

I've been using this on my Android phone (but have not audited it, I should really do that some time): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bluhell-firew...

ABP has a huge page-load slowdown on my phone, this is essentially unnoticeable, and still removes the vast majority that I encounter.

spain12년 전

Another (related) popular extension that I've noticed negatively affecting Firefox's performance is HTTPS Everywhere.

gcp12년 전

HTTPS Everywhere is mostly annoying because it stops random sites from working, and people generally forget to check that it's HTTPS Everywhere that's causing it.

Vanayad12년 전

Same issue appears in chrome as well. Got the site they linked to ~ 2.4GB before the browser stopped responding.

ColbieBryan12년 전

Editing hosts files, installing Privoxy or Glimmerblocker, using Ghostery, Bluhell Firewall - I've tried all of these suggestions and unfortunately ABP is the only way to go if blocking all unwanted pop-up's is a priority.

hokkos12년 전

LastPass is victim of the same fate.

kijin12년 전

LastPass is bearable if you disable all the DOM-modifying options, such as highlighting and adding pretty icons to input fields. Instead I use keyboard shortcuts to select the login info to use.

nclark12년 전

i would rather have my browser crash and never open again for the rest of my life than not use adblock. take all the memory, CPU, fuck it GPU that you want, you fantastic addon.

axx12년 전

It's 2014.

My computer has 12 Gigabytes of RAM.

I don't give a shit, as long as i don't have to view those terrible stupid Ads.

Advertisers, fix your practises and i will view your Ads again.

frozenport12년 전

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

davidgerard12년 전

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

qwerta12년 전

My computer has 32GB RAM and I do care. For start it affects battery lifetime. I also do performance testing and it can be ruined if some page uses too much CPU.

raverbashing12년 전

One of the best ad-blockers is actually called FlashBlock (not sure this is the name today)

It will remove around 90% of obnoxiousness...

VoxPelli12년 전

Or you just go to Tools > Addons > Plugins and chose to have Firefox ask you before it activates the Flash plugin for a page – same functionality I think?

raverbashing12년 전

Good, looks like it's a new feature.

Yeah, this would be more or less the same functionality (FlashBlock makes it per item, so you can, for example see a video but not activate the other elements)

wutbrodo12년 전

I think the Firefox plugin option does this too (at least, it works that way in Chrome). You can activate a plugin (and only that plugin) by clicking on it.

chris_wot12년 전

Well, I most certainly do care. Unfortunately, I've disabled ABP.

sdfjkl12년 전

On the other hand AdBlock (edge of course, not the co-opted plus), saves quite a bit of network traffic. Nice if you're on metered (or slow) internet.

ladzoppelin12년 전

Use Bluhell Firewall and NoScript for Firefox instead of ABP. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bluhell-firew...

column12년 전

also don't forget to set noscript.firstRunRedirection to false after installing NoScript to prevent it from opening its homepage after every update.