Ad Blocking Extensions Tested for Performance

https://www.raymond.cc/blog/10-ad-blocking-extensions-tested-for-best-performance/view-all/

by rayshan • 11 years ago

282 97 11 years ago

raymond.cc

scrollaway2• 11 years ago

blogspam, stop upvoting this please.

dang• 11 years ago

Is that fair? The article looks a bit spammy, but seems to be an actual test not copied from elsewhere.

mcintyre1994• 11 years ago

The article's solid and substantial, it's the first I've seen to quantify the effect of ABP's acceptable ads policy. Also they have a view all button that works.

scrollaway2• 11 years ago

Sorry, you're right. The format looks like blogspam; I closed it nearly immediately. A "10x" title, ads, a "Norton" icon at the top (what?)...

mtgx• 11 years ago

How is it blogspam? It looks like a comprehensive test.

rockdoe3• 11 years ago

They didn't seem to know about e10s in Firefox Nightly which would have solved their "no separate process" thing.

Measuring peak CPU is very, very stupid. The best Ad Blocker should have near 100% CPU but for an extremely short amount of time. Using 100% CPU is making the most efficient use of the hardware, not being inefficient. Now, I think due to the way they're measuring, it's actually closer to being average CPU because task manager samples over a period.

Also: "Firefox didn’t like this page at all and we couldn’t get consistent readings to run tests, on every refresh the browser would simply not respond or crash."

Huh? I think somethings wrong there. Firefox obviously renders tmz.com. A bug in the thing they used to monitor page load times? Did they check the performance impact of it?

mirimir• 11 years ago

Yes, Firefox loads tmz.com just fine. In a Debian VM, through a nested chain of three VPN services. But then, that's with Noscript and Adblock Plus.

Also, Privacy Badger reports 47 trackers on raymond.cc but just 20 on tmz.com ;)

zobzu• 11 years ago

Yeah thats pretty weird it does load just fine.

that makes me question the validity of the test in general... also it'd be interesting to benchmark tracking protection vs ublock on Firefox.

zamalek• 11 years ago

Measuring peak CPU is very, very stupid. The best Ad Blocker should have near 100% CPU but for an extremely short amount of time.

You'd be surprised about how many people perceive this as a bad thing. I've more than once had tickets from customers complaining about high CPU usage under load scenarios. Can't wait to see what journalists make of Servo (which, if up to scratch, will hopefully peg CPU near 100% for a brief period).

However, higher CPU usage associated with longer response times is a different story entirely.

it's actually closer to being average CPU because task manager samples over a period.

Forget about that: they're even using the wrong tool. Perfmon should have been used. Eyeballing it is completely useless.

Firefox obviously renders tmz.com.

Renders perfectly for me, too.

userbinator• 11 years ago

I've more than once had tickets from customers complaining about high CPU usage under load scenarios

What they're really saying is not "you should make the CPU usage lower by spreading it over a longer time", but that the CPU is at 100% for an excessively long period of time. In other words, that 100% period should ideally be so short that it's below the sampling interval and does not appear as 100%.

dingaling• 11 years ago

Using 100% CPU is making the most efficient use of the hardware, not being inefficient

Not necessarily with modern processors. A power-managedCPU at 50% clock-speed actually uses less than half of the power as at 100%.

The relationship of speed to power is not linear, so for a laptop user the most efficient use of hardware might actually be running one job for twice as long at half-speed.

JoeAltmaier• 11 years ago

Not to mention,usually 100% CPU is a red flag - something is spinning (stuck).

eXpl0it3r3• 11 years ago

Also if it's really using 100% of the CPU (not just one core), then it will affect the overall PC experience since it uses up all available resources and doesn't leave anything for other processes.

I personally dislike it when an application makes my "PC" lag every now and then. CPU time and RAM are shared resources, thus applications should make sure to not act selfish unless asked for (e.g. encoding a video, etc).

rockdoe3• 11 years ago

A power-managedCPU at 50% clock-speed actually uses less than half of the power as at 100%.

But it'll take longer to render the page, which you also don't want.

the84724• 11 years ago

A power-managedCPU at 50% clock-speed actually uses less than half of the power as at 100%.

That's ignoring the overhead of not being able to sleep the whole CPU, including uncore stuff for twice as long if you're only computing at half the speed.

gorhill• 11 years ago

Measuring peak CPU is very, very stupid

I think it's pretty obvious that the expression "peak CPU usage" implies "peak average CPU usage over a period of time", for the simple fact that literal "peak CPU usage" makes absolutely no sense -- CPU usage is always over a period of time.

com2kid• 11 years ago

Using 100% CPU is making the most efficient use of the hardware,

I have 4 cores and another 4 through hyper threading.

If 100% of my CPU is ever used up to render what amounts of a couple kilobytes of text content, then I start to wonder what is wrong.

aidos• 11 years ago

So it looks like about 1/4 of the time spent loading a page these days is spent on the page and the remaining 3/4 are waiting for ad networks. There's got to be an opportunity there.

I previously worked at a digital agency and one of my final projects was building the website for a large TV channel. At one point I had to have a meeting with the ad network to go through the integration.

The technical people involved didn't know anything about how their products worked or the implications of integrating them. No idea if they were blocking or async.

At one point I was trying to understand what, if any, changes I might need to make to handle their ads that did full background take overs. "No no no, it's an expanding mpu" - sure, fine, what does that even mean!?

(Don't get me started on having to swap using js for switching images in the gallery for using individual pages because the onmiture page tracking numbers were the metric that everything was measured by for selling ad space)

/rant

You'd think with all the smart people that have put their minds to ads on the internet, there would be lightning fast, targeted ads that actually worked by now.

Swizec• 11 years ago

You'd think with all the smart people that have put their minds to ads on the internet, there would be lightning fast, targeted ads that actually worked by now.

It's called Facebook Ads, and Google AdWords. Another name for what you seek is "product placement in movies". Yet another is PR.

For instance, looking at the trailer for the new Transporter, one has to wonder how much Audi paid to have that movie made.

And if you look closely at most journalism on the modern web, it is nothing but a thinly veiled ad for a thing.

pbhjpbhj• 11 years ago

I've got Google ads on my blog and they add 2.4s to a 4.9s load time. Google's own Pagespeed shows me that they [Google] are not doing basic things like caching immutable resources or minifying javascripts - which to me is really baffling.

Indeed the longest events on the page - as reported by Firefox dev tools - are connections to https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/ which are 0.7 and 0.8s; connection to https://www.google.com/pagead/drt/ui which is 1.3s; and connection to http://fls-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/ is 1.4s.

Meanwhile on a commercial page I manage the second hint on my 94/100 score on Pagespeed is to "leverage browser caching" - all the resources listed, like api.js, are part of Google's analytics. Under minify javascript there are Facebook and Google resources (for Like and +1 buttons).

This is of course not a scientific analysis; instead I say it to illustrate that the smart people at Google and Facebook don't appear to be focussed on this end of things - I'm guessing the minify thing saves them resources, that they minify based on a balance of delivery costs vs. processing costs and that full minification is not worthwhile to them ... I'm just annoyed I can't get a 100/100 pagespeed score without removing Google's ads/analytics from pages!

manigandham5• 11 years ago

I've worked on lots of ad networks and am now building my own. The sad fact is that most ad companies are not built by top engineers. It's an industry that has lots of shady international players with lots of fraud and politics. Even when there is good code, it's all usually focused on the backend with no thought about the end user experience. Add to that both buyers and salespeople who are clueless about technical details and this is what happens.

coldpie• 11 years ago

I've worked on lots of ad networks and am now building my own.

Sorry to hear about your failing business model.

http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/how-ad-blocking-could-...

Fiahil2• 11 years ago

The sad fact is that most ad companies are not built by top engineers.

This is an interesting thought. Working in a environment close to advertisement (travel recommendation engine), I have a few possible explanations on that.

- First, working in with a product that have no (or close to) added value for end users can be very bothering, and top engineers care about doing useful things.

- Second, to design a fast, simple and honest ad network you must fight your own business/marketing team (because they always want more data, higher click through rate, etc). Since they have most of the power here, they end up hiring more diligent engineers who won't argue about privacy, curated content and other stuff.

- Third, top engineers are working in ad companies, and secretly conspire to make the whole system collapse from the inside.

mjevans• 11 years ago

What would make things /really/ fast is optimizing an ad based around what brought a person to the page, rather than anything in particular about that person.

In other words, use referers to figure out if they came in based on keywords from a search engine (ads targeted more towards that, but still biased to the page viewed) or otherwise just based on the content of the page.

That's it; the first can be quickly memoised across a set of common terms for a page (and while doing so the faster content of page based results can be served instead).

No more silly tracking, just showing what someone is likely to be interested in at that moment.

the-dude• 11 years ago

One of my pet projects is 'wijVrij', a cheap TP-Link router with OpenWRT and a bootup-script which installs the winhelp2002 hosts file.

Works wonders on all your devices. https://wijvrij.nl ( dutch )

jackgavigan• 11 years ago

At the end of last year, I spent a while working with an adtech firm, helping them figure out their product strategy. They all use Ghostery and I started using it too. Subjectively, my web-browsing experience improved massively, particularly page load times. It's nice to see that experience borne out by objective testing.

I often think that companies like Ghostery are missing a trick by not advertising themselves as a method of speeding up your internet connection because that's really what it does.

XzetaU8• 11 years ago

"Ghostery, NoScript.. add-ons frequently phone home"

https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2015-A...

stingraycharles• 11 years ago

Well yeah, because Ghostery is a product of Evidon, which helps adtech businesses to get visitors to opt-in to tracking. It's a clever strategy, because they give valuable feedback about which ads and trackers are blocked for which reasons. If you can't beat them, outcompete them!

(I worked as CTO of an adserving platform and had to reject sales calls from Evidon on an almost monthly basis)

paulryanrogers• 11 years ago

If they were using Ghostery to block ads--aside from testing--that would be ironic.

andor2• 11 years ago

A much overlooked alternative to installing sketchy addons is to simply disable Javascript by default.

dtech• 11 years ago

This also breaks 95% of the web

emn135• 11 years ago

Just 95%?

barrkel• 11 years ago

Nowhere near 95% of the web; I can attest to this because I disable JS on my default phone browser, and it speeds up everything massively.

Something may be broken on 95% of web pages (e.g. commenting or menus), but the main bit of the web - rendering hypertext and following links - mostly works.

Web applications less so, of course. But I don't think they're 95% of the web.

andor2• 11 years ago

You're spreading FUD. Disabling Javascript by default is one of the easiest ways to reduce browser attack surface, improve page load times and to remove the most annoying ads. The vast majority of pages work (to some degree) without scripts.

If you really need scripting on a page, it's very uncomplicated to add an exception in Chrome: just click the "Javascript blocked" icon in the address bar, and choose "Always allow Javascript on example.com".

logfromblammo3• 11 years ago

It partially breaks 100% of sites that require the user to blindly execute scripts from unknown second or third parties before presenting a usable response, and 0% of sites that do not. At the risk of not finding a true Scotsman, I would argue that sites that do not give a meaningful response to an HTTP request as is, without client-side processing, are not making themselves part of the web.

When I click a link and see a blank page, I often click the back button or close the tab rather than allow it to run scripts. You do not need a script to display text. That functionality has been present since Sir Tim wrote version 0.1 .

Would it be so hard to provide alternate text for no-script browsers that says "Some content on this site is only viewable to users that allow scripts hosted by www.example.com and js.example.com to run on their browser clients."? No. It's not. There is no excuse for serving a blank page full of invisible scripts.

wnevets• 11 years ago

even Steve Gibson of www.grc.com fame has given up on disabling javascript.

the84724• 11 years ago

sketchy

what justifies the usage of "sketchy" for these particular addons? Many of them are open source, you can audit them yourself. Or you could hope that the reviewers did a decent job.

emn135• 11 years ago

The methodology is questionable on several fronts:

- you can't use the load event to compare advert-heavy vs. advert-free load times. The load event does not fire when the page is usable by the viewer, it fires when every last request is done, in particular even requests fired from various advert iframes. However, those requests may not impact page usability. The load event may even never fire - any offscreen 1px spacer gif that times out will cause that! I don't think there is a built-in event for "done-enough", but the load event is certainly misleading.

- opening the developer tools causes various side-effects; those can cause the page to load more slowly than usual. You shouldn't benchmark with developer tools open (unless you're explicitly targeting usage with devtools open...)

- comparing load times across browsers as reported by the browsers themselves may be valid, but it's not obvious. You definitely want to check that carefully.

- Measuring "peak" CPU usage is almost meaningless without considering how long the CPU is used.

- Measuring the chrome extension process CPU usage and memory usage isn't very helpful, because running this kind of extension causes CPU usage and memory usage in every content tab. Both of these statistics for chrome in this use-case are meaningless. You'd need to measure the memory usage and CPU-time of the entire chrome process tree to get meaningful results. Even in Firefox without e10s it's not valid to measure just the main process CPU and memory usage because plugins are in separate processes (and things like flash or h264 decoding can definitely use CPU and memory).

The only thing this page really makes a decent case for is that Chrome loads pages faster than Firefox - but even there, it's not clear we're dealing with an apples-to-apples comparison.

eXpl0it3r3• 11 years ago

you can't use the load event to compare advert-heavy vs. advert-free load times

I don't see why not. It's exactly what they want to show, how much quicker pages can load if you don't have to load the ads. And I personally am not satisfied with a page that has loaded to the extend of usability. Either a site loads fast or it doesn't.

opening the developer tools causes various side-effects

As long as it's done for all the tests it should not matter. Whatever "side-effects" are introduced will be applied for all tests. Of course this means that the values themselves can't be used to compare the result against other tests, but the goal here was anyways to compare between the different ad blocks and not to generate values for general statistics.

chrismorgan• 11 years ago

Some pages will be becoming usable before the DOMContentLoaded event is fired. Some will become usable shortly after DOMContentLoaded is fired. Some will become usable when load is fired. Some will become usable several seconds after that. Some will never become usable. (Cynical aside: the ones with excessive ads might fit in that classification.) There is no event that measures readiness of a page, nor can there be; there can only be a collection of reasonable heuristics.

georgebarnett• 11 years ago

A page may be usable at an earlier event however if the browser is still working then it's still burning CPU and battery life.

baoyu• 11 years ago

You don’t need perfect measurements to make decisions.

Comparing times between browser-defined events in the same browser opening the same site on the same day is about the most apples-to-apples as you can get.

kbenson• 11 years ago

No, but you need to know the approximate error thresholds on your measurements to make useful decisions.

jlarocco3• 11 years ago

I'm not sure any of that matters. As long as the same thing was measured in the same way each time, I think the results are relevant.

For your first point, the measurement wasn't "usability", it was how long it took for the load event to fire.

Second, having dev tools open should affect all results the same way. The absolute number isn't important, it's the relative ordering, which should be the same whether dev tools are open or not.

The rest of your points are just nitpicking. Maybe he didn't use the absolute best way to measure CPU or memory usage, but I'm willing to accept they're good enough proxy measures that the results are relevant.

emn135• 11 years ago

Why would you care when the load event fires? The load event does not represent the page being what a normal user would call loaded.

Its sort of like measuring profit by revenue - sure, there's some correlation, but it's far from obvious.

bentcorner• 11 years ago

This is exactly what ETW was designed to help you measure.

Running WPRUI with first level triage will measure CPU along with a bunch of other stuff. Enabling ReferenceSet under memory Resource Analysis will measure memory usage.

Chrome has an ETW provider, I poked around a bit and couldn't find any for FF (it looks like they register one for the JS engine?)

I'm not familiar with how to solve the "page loaded enough but not done" problem, but IMO if you measure end-to-end times it's probably a close-enough proxy. Maybe measure several times and report on those statistics.

(Edit: Taking a trace with/without the adblocker enabled should allow you to exactly count # of sampled cycles spent in the adblocker - easy to compare in WPA, as long as there are events emitted indicating page load start/stop).

(Edit2: Using UIforETW along with Chrome 46+ will let you see ETW events:

https://github.com/google/UIforETW)

somesay• 11 years ago

Also keep in mind they tested all extensions with their default filter lists configuration while it reads like EasyList and EasyPrivacy would be efficient enough. As applying filter rules is basically the main work of those extensions and most extensions can use the same lists, they should have set all to the same lists where possible.

taspeotis• 11 years ago

I've found uBlock Origin increases memory usage heavily on https://vimcolorschemetest.googlecode.com/svn/html/index-c.h...

asdfaoeu2• 11 years ago

To be fair that page has 430 iframes. I'd say that's fairly atypical.

the84724• 11 years ago

Atypical? Amazon does (did?) heavily use some <iframe>/<object> trickery to preload resources.

dale-cooper• 11 years ago

On the other hand, i just tried opening this page with adblock plus and it froze the browser tab for quite a while. Switched to ublock origin and at least the tab stays responsive.

Fiahil2• 11 years ago

Sure it's a nice test, and gives a keen idea of how much performance you can grab by using uBlock Origin.

However, what about pages _without_ ads? Am I going to experience a significant performance hit when running an adblocker on genuine websites? This is important. Because, assuming the advertising industry is going to self-destruct tomorrow morning, am I going to experience a slower web if I let my add-on activated, and thus letting an opportunity for the ads to reappear later?

bhouston• 11 years ago

uBlock Origin seems pretty comparable to most of the other adblockers with the exception of the pretty horrible AdBlock Plus.

mnw21cam• 11 years ago

Would be interesting to have tested using a hosts file (like from http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ ) instead of an ad blocker. Seems to work very well for me, and it doesn't cause the browser to use loads of RAM.

huuu• 11 years ago

I'm not sure: isn't it faster to just refuse the request than directing it to localhost and waiting for a time out?

JoachimSchipper• 11 years ago

localhost will RST the connection just fine, provided you don't have a webserver listening there.

rocky11382• 11 years ago

That's the point. We'd like to see which is faster.

jlgaddis• 11 years ago

As long as you don't have a firewall blocking traffic to/from localhost, the TCP connection will be reset almost immediately (assuming you don't have an httpd running on port 80) so you won't have to wait for a timeout.

amelius• 11 years ago

Are there any ad-blockers out there that also block Google ads (inline in websites, and also on top of search results)?

asdfaoeu2• 11 years ago

uBlock Origin does, though I'm pretty sure all do.

tim333• 11 years ago

Next we need to find the best blocker cocktail. I use uBlock Origin, Ghostery and Flashcontrol on Chrome. Bit over the top possibly - can take a bit of trial an error to see what's blocking the thing if something you want doesn't load.

tomku• 11 years ago

Seconding the combo of uBlock Origin and Ghostery, but I use the built-in plugin blocking in Chrome. Does Flashcontrol offer anything over that?

jdmichal• 11 years ago

Have you tried uMatrix? If you have, I'm curious how you think it compares to your current mix.

the84724• 11 years ago

seconded, for people who want to sacrifice some convenience for control µmatrix may be a better choice.

jmnicolas• 11 years ago

I heard about µblock origin on HN and blindly trusted the positive comments. Glad to see my trust was well deserved, thank you all.

teaneedz• 11 years ago

Why is uBlock somewhat frowned upon here on HN? From what I've seen published it's still a good solution - works well for me. I thought the original developer gave up the project and was being rather difficult about the whole thing.

rockdoe3• 11 years ago

He came back and has been improving it actively, and wasn't too happy about technical decisions in the fork.

malchow4• 11 years ago

In reality, people want a page that becomes usable as quickly as possible. Specifically, people use hovers and scrolling to test that a given page is 'ready.'

That is very different from a page that fires DOMContentLoaded as quickly as possible. That metric is pretty much irrelevant to real people.

Which is part of why ads aren't quite as nasty as a lot of tech industry people make out.

degenerate• 11 years ago

When I start scrolling and the page seems ready to use, and then ads start popping in late and breaking the document flow in the first few seconds - you better believe I'm blocking them on your site.

malchow4• 11 years ago

I quite agree. There's no excuse for that. Although most of the time it isn't the fault of the website or publisher, but rather of an adtech partner.

hutattedonmyarm• 11 years ago

On mobile I actually care if the pages continues to load a ton of shit, even if it's usable already

malchow4• 11 years ago

I suppose that's right. But it's also kind of a short term worry. I mean, don't you think mobile networks are going to keep getting relatively faster and relatively cheaper and will therefore be more relatively OK with a few ad-related keepalives?

Around this time in 1997, the PBS Newshour website[1] was an outrageous 113.7KB, which at the very top end of the GSM GPRS 2G networks of the time, 115 kbit/s, would take 8 long seconds to download. Why? Because of all of those obnoxious Sun Netra banner ads![2]

What do you get in 8 seconds on LTE today? Lord of the Rings in 720p. Or a whole bunch of Buzzfeed pages with some ad trackers, sure.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/19970605132107/http://www1.pbs.o...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/19970605132107im_/http://www1.pb...

rocky11382• 11 years ago

I would have really liked to have seen an ad-reduced hosts file compared to these in-browser blockers.

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

jakeogh• 11 years ago

Lowest overhead: Disable JS (add it to a hotkey) and use DNS level filtering: https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsmasq-blacklist

With surf+tabbed, each tab is it's own process, so you can enable and disable JS and or plugins per page.

sandworm101• 11 years ago

Forgetting the accuracy of the OP, I cannot be the only one who doesn't care in the least that adblockers slow load times. Between my ISP's shoddy service, the popups and distracting animations adblockers stop, the net effect is a faster overall experience. A few seconds on page load is a fair price to pay for the increased privacy and security.

Ad Blocking Extensions Tested for Performance

Related Stories