AdBlock Plus’s effect on Firefox’s memory usage

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

by harshal • 12 years ago

492 258 12 years ago

blog.mozilla.org

kmfrk2• 12 years ago

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_t• 12 years ago

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

kmfrk2• 12 years ago

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

neals• 12 years ago

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?

insky2• 12 years ago

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...

VLM• 12 years ago

"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.

Nursie3• 12 years ago

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

mschuster912• 12 years ago

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.

nnethercote10• 12 years ago

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.

bru6• 12 years ago

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.

nfoz2• 12 years ago

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?

hollerith2• 12 years ago

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.

clarry4• 12 years ago

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.

nextw33k• 12 years ago

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.

Omniusaspirer3• 12 years ago

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.

twistedpair• 12 years ago

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

nhebb• 12 years ago

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.

svantana• 12 years ago

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

bru6• 12 years ago

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

Sevores• 12 years ago

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

mhaymo• 12 years ago

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.

insky2• 12 years ago

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.

gerbal2• 12 years ago

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.

FedRegister• 12 years ago

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.

alipang• 12 years ago

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.

hypron• 12 years ago

Check out chrome://memory-redirect/

gerbal2• 12 years ago

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.

graylights• 12 years ago

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

artursapek2• 12 years ago

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

Silhouette5• 12 years ago

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.

gcp3• 12 years ago

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

dcc1• 12 years ago

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

bru6• 12 years ago

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.

TarpitCarnivore2• 12 years ago

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

barrkel• 12 years ago

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.

userbinator6• 12 years ago

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

migbac• 12 years ago

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

Litost• 12 years ago

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.

ElongatedTowel• 12 years ago

That doesn't hide the blocked elements though.

aidos• 12 years ago

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.

thegeomaster• 12 years ago

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...

bru6• 12 years ago

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.

mp3geek• 12 years ago

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.

userbinator6• 12 years ago

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.

throwaway77672• 12 years ago

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.

joeblau• 12 years ago

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

math0ne• 12 years ago

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?

bithush• 12 years ago

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_wrong• 12 years ago

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.

icebraining2• 12 years ago

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.

hbbio• 12 years ago

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).

andreasvc3• 12 years ago

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.

psykovsky• 12 years ago

Cloudflare can, somehow...

Donzo• 12 years ago

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

You're missing important messages from sponsors.

bambax• 12 years ago

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_• 12 years ago

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__4• 12 years ago

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…

Eiwatah4• 12 years ago

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.

joosters3• 12 years ago

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.

gorhill17• 12 years ago

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.

sspiff• 12 years ago

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.

idlewan• 12 years ago

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!

Gmo• 12 years ago

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)

gorhill17• 12 years ago

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.

alyandon2• 12 years ago

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

AJ007• 12 years ago

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

tty• 12 years ago

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)?

gorhill17• 12 years ago

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).

htns• 12 years ago

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.

gorhill17• 12 years ago

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.

rane2• 12 years ago

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.

gorhill17• 12 years ago

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.

kretor2• 12 years ago

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

losvedir• 12 years ago

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.

gorhill17• 12 years ago

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

Shivetya• 12 years ago

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?

gorhill17• 12 years ago

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

vfclists• 12 years ago

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?

gorhill17• 12 years ago

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.

r12e• 12 years ago

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

NDizzle• 12 years ago

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?!

Osiris• 12 years ago

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?

gorhill17• 12 years ago

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.

agumonkey• 12 years ago

also breaks youtube

RobotCaleb3• 12 years ago

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

gorhill17• 12 years ago

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.

sliverstorm2• 12 years ago

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.

aw3c2• 12 years ago

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.

anigbrowl• 12 years ago

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.

grrowl• 12 years ago

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.

SixSigma2• 12 years ago

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/

mixedbit• 12 years ago

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

Silhouette5• 12 years ago

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.

rjaco31• 12 years ago

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.

joosters3• 12 years ago

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.

andreasvc3• 12 years ago

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.

joosters3• 12 years ago

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.

nly• 12 years ago

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.

nnethercote10• 12 years ago

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

maaaats• 12 years ago

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.

nnethercote10• 12 years ago

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.

m_eiman• 12 years ago

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.

baby• 12 years ago

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.

mschuster912• 12 years ago

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!

__david__4• 12 years ago

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.

walden42• 12 years ago

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.

wutbrodo3• 12 years ago

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.

chrismorgan• 12 years ago

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).

Groxx• 12 years ago

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.

spain• 12 years ago

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

gcp3• 12 years ago

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.

Vanayad• 12 years ago

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

ColbieBryan• 12 years ago

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.

hokkos• 12 years ago

LastPass is victim of the same fate.

kijin• 12 years ago

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.

nclark• 12 years ago

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.

axx• 12 years ago

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.

davidgerard• 12 years ago

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

frozenport• 12 years ago

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!

raverbashing2• 12 years ago

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

It will remove around 90% of obnoxiousness...

VoxPelli• 12 years ago

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?

chris_wot2• 12 years ago

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

qwerta• 12 years ago

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.

sdfjkl• 12 years ago

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.

ladzoppelin• 12 years ago

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

column• 12 years ago

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

caiob• 12 years ago

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

SudoNick2• 12 years ago

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.

nnethercote10• 12 years ago

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.

SudoNick2• 12 years ago

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?

mwexler• 12 years ago

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.

nnethercote10• 12 years ago

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).

linux_devil• 12 years ago

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 .

nnethercote10• 12 years ago

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

Maybe it's time to try switching back?

dbbolton• 12 years ago

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

mullingitover• 12 years ago

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.

DenisM2• 12 years ago

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__4• 12 years ago

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.

Steuard• 12 years ago

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?

205guy• 12 years ago

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.

varkson• 12 years ago

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

Shorel2• 12 years ago

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.

acqq• 12 years ago

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

BorisMelnik• 12 years ago

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.

chrismcb• 12 years ago

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

demi_alucard• 12 years ago

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.

Shorel2• 12 years ago

My browser is fast again!

Thank you, really thank you.

vladtaltos• 12 years ago

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...

AdBlock Plus’s effect on Firefox’s memory usage

Related Stories