Show HN: Where Adblock+ injects 20K CSS rules, HTTPSB injects one

https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/wiki/Adblock-Plus-memory-consumption

by gorhill • 12 years ago

221 178 12 years ago

Adblock+ has been fine for me. Has anyone had any problems?

Personally, Adblock+ has earned my trust over a long period of time, so it's hard to see myself switching to something else unless the reason was dire.

batiudrami• 12 years ago

This is a response to an article[1] on memory use, and specifically a bug/limitation of ABP which causes it to use large amounts of memory (1GB+) on web pages which utilise many iframes.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-plus...

mkesper• 12 years ago

Trusting Adblock is hard because of the "acceptable ads" feature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus#Controversy_over_...

zorbo5• 12 years ago

As far as I know (anybody please correct me if I'm wrong on any of this), it's Adblock PLUS that can't be trusted. Adblock (without the plus) is a completely separate project that's much more trustworthy. Adblock PLUS basically usurped Adblock by appending a "plus", making it seem like it's somehow better than Adblock.

harkyns_castle• 12 years ago

I shifted to using Adblock Edge [1] after that. I got a good chuckle out of the term 'acceptable ads' though.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/

fernandotakai• 12 years ago

you can use adblock edge [0] -- it's a fork without the whitelist for ads

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/

gorhill4• 12 years ago

You don't have to switch. The code is GPLv3, rather modular, and if they decline to import it, the idea behind it can be easily implemented.

acjohnson55• 12 years ago

My biggest problem is the memory usage. I use a lot of tabs at once, and I'm regularly finding myself swapping on an 8GB MBP.

rmccue• 12 years ago

Is there any plan to port this to Firefox? It'd be nice to see HTTPSB as an alternative to ABP there too.

JetSpiegel• 12 years ago

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

forrestthewoods• 12 years ago

I rage quit Firefox years ago because it's impossible to discuss it's critical perf issues without people pointing shifting blame to plugins. It got so bad I ran clean installs that never had a plugin ever, still had perf issues, and people on the internet simply refused Firefox could be at fault.

I switched to Chrome and have never looked back. I also have never had a single issue with any AdBlock plugin in Chrome. Maybe they're doing something insanely stupid. I don't know. I use Chrome where it just works so I also don't care.

goochtek• 12 years ago

I was in your situation. I switched from Firefox to Chrome and thought I would never go back. Funnily enough, I went back recently (a few months ago) and have really been enjoying the recent Firefox editions. Sure, they make some "interesting" design choices, but overall I believe it's really improved recently. You should really give it another shot.

sliverstorm• 12 years ago

It's the memory gluttony that really puts a cramp in Chrome's style. I can't always afford to run it.

jwilliams• 12 years ago

I run Chrome as my general browser and Firefox for development. So I use both in anger every day. I must say that FF has caught up, plus it feels like Chrome is starting to fall behind -- I regularly get lockups in Chrome (particularly GMail) and FF has made great strides. To the point that I might flip and use FF for my everyday work too.

ksec2• 12 years ago

Exactly right. Everything is comparative. If Chrome never appeared in the first place, Firefox may well still reign supreme. The problem is Chrome first appeared so god damn fast, and has better caching, advance / pre DNS lookup, rendering and responsiveness, startup speed etc. Firefox looked the IE of its days. Then Firefox did improve, ( at its own pace ) and Chrome manage to slip behind in multiple areas.

But i really wanted a third choice, WebKit based Browser that is Firefox Like ( Tab OverFlow. ) Or may be i should just buy a Mac.

jacobolus• 12 years ago

Once you get past about 30 tabs, Chrome performance drops through the floor while memory usage just balloons; by contrast, both Firefox and Safari hold up pretty well. That, plus sending every keystroke in the URL bar to Google, and a bunch of really quirky UIs that I deeply dislike, keeps me from using Chrome for anything but testing.

Edit: This seems to be a controversial comment. I’m curious whether folks disagree with me that Chrome doesn’t work very well for many tabs, or if they think that’s irrelevant to the discussion, or what?

shanelja• 12 years ago

I don't think I've ever had the need for 30 tabs; the magic of the internet is that if I ever need to see a specific website, I can just type in a URL.

kuschku• 12 years ago

And the worst thing is: Chrome still doesn't properly support HiDPI on Linux or Windows. The bug got closed as: "Working as intended, just zoom into the page".

TwoBit• 12 years ago

What you're saying applies to FireFox of years ago, but that's changed, especially with the big memory cleanup of a year or so ago. It now performs ~equal to Chrome under low stress and better under high stress.

truncate• 12 years ago

Which platform do you use? For me FF on Windows clearly performed worse than Chrome. On Linux I find it difficult to to see any difference.

aluhut• 12 years ago

I never have perf issues. My machine is not the newest, I run win7 and have serveral applications running next to it. I also don't see much difference between the sum of chrome processes and the single FF process (both ABP installed. FF full with different addons).

I switched to Chrome when it was new and everybody was telling me how slow FF was compared to that. I came back to FF because there was no relevant difference and I missed several AddOns as well as the oldschool win2k look I could give it. Today I use Chrome (adn Opera) as reference but it'll never become my main browser. The people who made me change, came back to FF, so I guess it wasn't such a big deal for them also.

Edit: I started to hate Chrome when I had to remove it from my parents PC every time I went there. I guess it's the Java Updater or something similar...

nnethercote3• 12 years ago

When somebody reports a performance problem with Firefox, the first question is always "do you have any add-ons installed" precisely because a lot of them do impact performance significantly. That's not necessarily bad -- e.g. I happily use ABP despite the memory and speed hit -- but there's a reason why it's always the first question.

Having said that, as a Firefox developer I'm sorry that people didn't believe you when you had problems. We're certainly aware that Firefox's performance did compare poorly to Chrome's, which is why numerous performance programs were introduced to fix this difference. MemShrink is the one I started about three years ago: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink. It has resulted in many fixes, both big and small, and it is ongoing. (Indeed, Firefox OS might not have been feasible without it.)

As some others have said, Firefox's performance is a lot better now than it was a couple of years ago. If you want to try it again and you have an old profile hanging around, I suggest that you "Reset Firefox" (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fi...) to clear up any lingering problems in that profile. Or you could just create a new profile. If you do try Firefox again, I'd be interested to hear how it goes. Thanks.

Serow2252• 12 years ago

Hi Nicholas, I just wanted to say thanks for being the public face of MemShrink. It's really great to have such visibility into this important work in one place, rather than scattered around a bunch of dev blogs etc. Also the continued focus from one person over an extended timeframe really helps get stuff done, from my experience as a PM. Thanks again!

Walkman2• 12 years ago

MY GOSH! I never realized how slow my page loadings were. Removed ABP (and a couple of extensions) after reading this and the memory consumption just went to 1/2 of what it used to be, the page loading times are just incredible... I always wondered why Chrome is soooo much slower compared to Firefox (ABP not installed on Firefox) but never investigated further. Thank you so much!

enscr3• 12 years ago

Whenever I opened a new tab & typed something in the address bar, it appeared after a 1-2 second delay. I used to think that was absurd on part of Chrome. However after removing ABP, the problem's gone.

That 20K number makes me cringe. For now, a little bit of ads are fine :)

pkulak• 12 years ago

I'm a big fan of Privoxy. Just get that stuff out of the browser entirely.

jrabone• 12 years ago

Yep. I run Privoxy and a DNS resolver configured to be authoritative for the worst 5000 or so ad farms. Zips along nicely, and works for every machine on the LAN or via remote VPN.

Fuck ads. Find a different business model.

boobsbr• 12 years ago

Interesting, in my experience, FF was always slower than Chrome.

anigbrowl• 12 years ago

I have not had any significant problems with ABP, but after trying out HTTPSB earlier this week it's become my most essential extension. It's not as user-friendly as Ghostery, ABP and a few others, but I really appreciate its ability to quickly show me what's actually happening on a given page. I would love to see it develop into a general-purpose diagnostic tool. After only having it installed for a few days, it's hard to imagine life without it - which is about the highest compliment I can give.

e1g• 12 years ago

Same - I installed HTTPSB as a dec tool, but ended up liking how much control it gives back to me about what is loaded on my pages. There was an initial period of frustration as I had to unblock the bare minimum required to make youtube/gmail/vimeo/facebook work as expected, and after that it's smooth sailing. ADP is gone, and I feel like I get my pages quicker and cleaner.

rwallace2• 12 years ago

Given that advertising pays for a lot of the services we all use, the use of Adblock and similar programs constitutes defection in game theory terms - the more people who do it, the worse off we all are - which means even if you choose to do it yourself (I personally don't), it is against your interests to encourage other people to do it.

Also, given that computing is one of very few areas of technology in which our species is still making substantial progress, and that progress is driven by market demand, even if you want to make your workload computationally cheaper for yourself, it is very much against your interests to encourage other people to follow suit; if every web browser starts using less memory, everyone is worse off.

I'm not going to start trying to persuade you personally to cooperate rather than defect - that's a value judgment you have to make - but please at least appreciate that it's a bad idea to encourage other people to defect!

givan• 12 years ago

People will pay for things that they will really need, advertising/freemium is used for all the things that we don't really need.

reedlaw• 12 years ago

Why not encourage people to pay for services they use and enjoy? The ad-supported services have mixed motives at best and tend to compromise on privacy when it affects their bottom-line.

Also, there are other reasons for blocking ads besides simple annoyance. They tend to be hosted by 3rd party domains that can track browsing history across sites.

rwallace2• 12 years ago

Micro-payments are a bad idea because making decisions costs mental energy, and the energy cost declines more slowly than the amount, so if you have to decide to pay a couple of cents to read an article, you end up spending more than a couple of cents worth of mental energy making the decision. It's a dead loss. Advertising is a better business model all around.

Walkman2• 12 years ago

I rather pay a small amount for services which I really need and like then see all the crap all the time. Also I don't mind less, more quality services over crappy sites full of ads...

Perdition• 12 years ago

Care more about others user-experience and safety (I primarily use ABP and NoScript to block malware attacks) than the fact that if advertising becomes less effective other methods to pay for websites will have to be developed, so I recommend people use ABP.

Also, advertising isn't "free", there is still a cost even if I am not seeing the money directly leave my wallet every time I see an ad. I would rather the ad supported model died out, the only reason it came to dominate is because there wasn't the technology to support other options when newspapers were first developed.

adamors• 12 years ago

I definitely agree that we take a lot of services for granted, but I don't think ads are the answer. For instance, a lot of sites I use daily accept donations (Reddit, Last.fm) and they offer some premium features for people who need them. Ads can be also incredibly annoying and sometimes considerably increase loading times.

ksec2• 12 years ago

Dont know why you got downvoted. But I agree that advertising is the key to web site revenue. Since the amount of people willing to pay are in extreme minorities.

I think the key is web page speed. Advertising slow down the page a lot and have adverse effect. Many uses Adblock / Ghostery just to speed up their internet browsing.

unhammer• 12 years ago

You could argue the opposite in "game theoretic terms" since much of the advertising industry lives off user-tracking and privacy violations. It's bad privacy hygiene to allow all that tracking into your browser.

(Though I've switched to privacy badger since it's not the advertising in itself that's bad.)

Arnt• 12 years ago

I suppose I cooperate: I use Ghostery, but not Adblock, because I see the point about ad income but do not see that it justifies tracking. It doesn't seem to make much difference in practice. Once you've eliminated the ads that involve too much tracking, there's little advertising left.

I'm not sure whether this is good or bad, and what it says about the advertising business.

Nursie• 12 years ago

Nope.

I'd like to live in a world with less advertising. Free services are of lesser concern. In terms of game theory it is absolutely, directly in my interest to promote systems that kill the effectiveness of blanket advertising and hopefully make it become a pointless exercise.

rimantas• 12 years ago

And browsing without adblock means theat those who really pay for our services—people buying online ads—are being robbed. They paid specific amount for a specific number of impressions. Ok, I browse without ad-block, buty I never click on ads. That means that all those impressions on the pages I visited are wasted. Sure, their owners get their money, but that's pure waste of money for the advertiser. If majority would browse with ad blockers, well, maybe the price for ads would increase, I don't know. But putting the blame on ad block users is lame, all add block does is to stop wasting the money.

pomfpomfpomf3• 12 years ago

I don't believe this is true for Google Adsense since it's CPC (cost per click), not per view.

Terr_• 12 years ago

The supply-side has defectors too.

I go on a blocking-spree for any site which (A) serve malware (B) unexpectedly plays sounds or epileptic animations (C) trashes site performance through a billion third-party loading items.

Even if it's just a lack of vetting by the ad-network, N-levels removed from the author, it represents a breach in that same completely-unspoken contract which I will take steps to protect myself from.

Finally, let's not confuse game-theory with "justice" or with our normative beliefs about how things should work.

facepalm• 12 years ago

Since I never click on ads, is there really a difference? I don't think so (assuming "pay per view" ads are rare).

pjc502• 12 years ago

if every web browser starts using less memory, everyone is worse off

This is gibberish. There's still plenty of demand for denser memory. You don't have to pretend that wasting memory on Adblock is somehow driving the progress of humanity.

mike-cardwell3• 12 years ago

If we make it difficult for services to be ad funded, perhaps alternative methods of funding will emerge. Perhaps alternative methods of service delivery will emerge too which don't require large companies to build their own data centres (peer to peer, distributed).

I don't get rid of ads on my systems because they're annoying. I do it because they introduce massive single points of failure, they add massive centralised attack vectors which have in the past been exploited, and will be in the future too, and because they slow down web browsing.

If you care about security, you use an ad blocker.

cw0• 12 years ago

The problem is that the alternative to ads is a paywall.

jacobgreenleaf• 12 years ago

Then again, maybe the alternative methods of funding won't emerge and AdBlock will destroy the web as we know it.

Confusion• 12 years ago

If you are sufficiently caring or savvy to use Adblock and the like, then you aren't the target audience anyway.

guelo2• 12 years ago

I can't think of an ad-based internet service that is promoting the progress of the species. Most of them, like Facebook, would be better if they weren't trying to sell ads.

dspillett• 12 years ago

Adblock and similar programs constitutes defection in game theory terms

Some would say that the following are also defections in the same terms though:

* Pop-up/-over advertising that gets in the way * Pop-under advertising * Auto-playing video that drains noticeable bandwidth and CPU power (and therefore battery) when mobile * Auto-playing audio, usually at some horrendous volume * Tracking us and storing derived data about our lives in quite some detail without our permission * Collecting free information, wrapping adverts around it, and working hard to make sure the ad wrapped version comes up top in search results above the non-encumbered version (please don't try defend this in the general case with the word "curating")

Free services paid for by the above are only free is you consider the above and related matters to not be costs (which presumably you don't, which is fair enough).

I don't actually run adblock/noscript/what-ever, for performance reasons and because of the inconvenience of false positives and such: I just avoid sites that irritate me with the non-tracking-related stuff (to the point of having some blacklisted in my local DNS settings) and accept that no matter what I do I'm going to be followed by Google, Facebook, and their less reputable compatriots.

rplnt• 12 years ago

That's what I liked about Opera's content blocker. There was no black list to start with. But if you encountered a site with annoying ads, you could just block it yourself without much hassle. If the ad wasn't intrusive, you could just leave it there.

DanielBMarkham• 12 years ago

Ads pay for things simply because that was the first model that caught on.

Ad-supported content is not the only business model. Simply because one bunch figured out how to make the internet pay doesn't mean the problem must be solved in one and only one way from here on out.

bgarbiak• 12 years ago

I've disabled AdBlock after recent "revelations" about its memory consumption. I use only Ghostery for now. So, websites/advertisers are free to show me ads, as long as they won't track me. Guess how many ads I see.

That should be a solution: serve me a static, non-intrusive, lightweight, curated ad related to your content (not to my browsing history), serve me it from your server, not from some third-party ad farm - then I will gladly see it. Furthermore, it will work even if I won't click it.

This model worked for paper magazines/newspapers, and I have no clue why it shouldn't work in a digital era. At least as a damn fallback.

izzydata• 12 years ago

I hate ads so I'm going to block them. You can't just shove things in my face that I can so easily decline and except that to be a good business model. I fully encourage the death of the ad based business model for web content. If that means I would eventually have to pay for things I actually want then that makes way more sense to me. Honestly though a website shouldn't expect to make money for simply existing and getting views. They should have something people actually want and are willing to buy.

joosters• 12 years ago

Banksy says it best:

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

dredmorbius5• 12 years ago

Nice. Just sourcing that: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/461383-people-are-taking-the...

StavrosK2• 12 years ago

The salient part is "public space". Websites aren't public space.

micampe• 12 years ago

Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law […]
Any advert in a public space [is] yours to take, re-arrange and re-use.

I feel pretty confident in saying AdBlock is not what he had in mind there.

Ironically, you just manipulated his words to your advantage, which is exactly what he advocates in that quote.

wutbrodo• 12 years ago

You've entirely misunderstood both Banksy's quote and the conversation on this thread. He's talking about the co-opting of _public spaces_ for advertisement; Walking down the street is an activity that anyone has a right to do with no contingencies, and he sees being "forced" to see advertising as an intrusion on that activity. Whether or not you agree with him, that's certainly an internally consistent view of things.

On the other hand, what we're talking about here is explicitly choosing to request content from a webpage and then complaining that the ads are an intrusion. There's no analogue to "walking through a public space": no fundamental right to view content that other people made on exactly the terms that you deem acceptable. As poor a comparison as it may be, the comparison to shoplifting is FAR more accurate than the comparison to what Banksy is describing.

thehooplehead• 12 years ago

I like this quote, it's well laid-out, but I don't think the reasoning is sound. At heart, the argument it voices anger at advertisers for forcing you to see things you don't want to see and feel things you don't want to feel. That's exactly the reasoning used to limit individual freedom of expression in many places. It creates a victim (the passive observer) in order to vilify an otherwise victimless crime (the person expressing themselves).

For the record, I hate ads too, but I see it as a fair exchange.

Below, I've streamlined and abstracted the quote. If you stuck "women" where I say "insert target," this would mirror a lot of really repressive hate speech that's going on in many parts of the world.

> People are taking the piss out of you everyday... [They] take a cheap shot at you and then disappear... [They] make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making [you] feel inadequate. They have access and they bully you with it. They are (insert target) and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head... You owe [them] nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you.

ronaldx• 12 years ago

I see it differently:

Ads are a net negative for me, my friends, and for society as a whole. I believe they are psychologically punishing.

Services which add value to people's lives, or to society, will be able to survive perfectly well without ads.

If I could, I would rather (game theoretically) punish those services which use ads unnecessarily. Adblock is the least I can do.

zorbo5• 12 years ago

By that logic, we shouldn't have done anything about pop-up windows with ads either? Yet we did, and the world was a little bit better for it. Naturally advertisers, being the sneaky shits they are, didn't learn their lessons and are now repeating the same tactics with javascript/html5 overlays. When those become too annoying, we will find a way around those too, and the world will keep on running.

To me, it's simple economics. If their contents is worth it, they'll find a way to monetize it. If they can't find a way to monetize it, then the contents wasn't worth it.

wpietri• 12 years ago

I'm with you on the first part, but I think the second is probably false. The commerce of information is very different than the sorts of commerce that gave rise to simple economics.

I'd love to see ads destroyed, but I wouldn't necessarily expect the economics of content to produce the personally or socially optimal content. We may need to be more deliberate about it.

visarga• 12 years ago

Given that advertising pays for a lot of the services we all use, the use of Adblock and similar programs constitutes defection in game theory terms

It's either clean internet or no internet for me - I can't stand the ads.

tim3332• 12 years ago

In game theory terms the other mugs pay. Works for me.

dredmorbius5• 12 years ago

Publishing's seen many business models over the years. Information is hard, for a number of reasons, and advertising has been utilized for mass-media for much of the past century (longer in print).

There's a lot wrong with ads: http://redd.it/24107v

I should add to that list "weaponized clickbait". Advertising directly promotes noxious content anti-patterns: http://redd.it/23twec

One alternative is syndication via a broadband / media tax: http://redd.it/1uotb3

Phil Hunt (Pirate Party UK) has a similar proposal: http://redd.it/1vknhc

moron4hire• 12 years ago

    "...if every web browser starts using less memory, everyone is worse off."

I think you're over applying the concept. That can't possibly be true.

Anderkent• 12 years ago

the more people who do it, the worse off we all are

No, that's totally not true. The more people who do it, the more pressure on advertisers to actually make less distracting ads - so that people don't feel like they have to block them. That's good.

simonbrown• 12 years ago

It's possible to apply to have your ads unblocked if they're unobtrusive.

https://eyeo.com/acceptable-ads-application.html

oska• 12 years ago

I disagree with your basic assumption - that we want to preserve a web where services are paid for by advertising revenue. And so I actively encourage others to defect because I want to see that model come crashing down. The more people who do it, the better off we all are.

amerkhalid• 12 years ago

I am of same believe. I don't use any ad blockers. And most ads don't bother me and sometimes I find useful stuff through ads. I don't even mind full page ads, that you have to view for 10 seconds before you can view the content. But I hate ads that play sound. Those are serious distractions and usually I would close the page before I get a chance to view it. I wish we can just block only annoying ads.

eevilspock2• 12 years ago

The vast majority has bought into the utter bullshit that advertising makes the web free. This delusion buries not only the fact that we have made a deal with the devil, but also that the deal really sucks. What we traded our souls for we don’t even get. The web would be both cheaper and better if we just paid for what we use straight up. And more importantly, society would be better. I'll explain all of these.

IT'S NOT FREE

We’re not Facebook’s customers, advertisers are (more on this below). But we are the advertiser’s customers, and the cost of the "free lunch" is simply shifted to the price of the things we buy from them. In other words we still end up paying for the full cost of Facebook (and even more, as I'll get to next). Costs may even shift regressively, to advertised products predominately consumed by those with lower incomes, in which case the poor are subsidizing the better off.

IT'S MORE EXPENSIVE...

Not only are you still paying for the full cost of the Facebook product you use, you are paying for all the advertising overhead: the costs of its advertising technology and infrastructure (huge, btw), the agency and creative costs (Don Draper and company have to pay for the hookers and scotch somehow, not to mention what’s-his-name who basically just lounges in his office barefoot thinking Japanese), and the advertiser's big marketing departments (that often outnumber and outspend the people making the product!).

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks. – Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera

So in addition to the original product cost and the ad overhead costs, you are also paying the opportunity cost of an inferior product (as Dennis Curtis points out in the OP) as well as the engineering costs of figuring out how to optimize ad revenue, because that’s what happens when websites have to design to please advertisers over pleasing us, the users. Dalton Caldwell makes this point comparing Sourceforge to Github[1]. As ergo says in a comment[2], “If the new news feed is making their advertisers happy (and bringing revenue into Facebook), then that's what they optimize for.” As jfoster says in a comment[3], “Ad-supported models untie the relationship between UX and revenue.”

Furthermore, our identities and privacy are bought and sold to the highest bidders. And where do the bidders get their money? From us of course! A double whammy! We're trading our privacy for free product? Bullshit. We get personalization? Bullshit. Personalization means optimizing something for me, not optimizing for the advertiser. Again, we're not the real customer. We’re certainly not Google’s[4][5].

WAIT. IT'S EVEN WORSE...

Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. – Tyler Durden, Fight Club

Think of the social costs of advertising. The web is infested with misinformation and manipulation. Beside the lying ads themselves, relying on a revenue stream entirely dependent on how many ads are seen severely affects the moral choices of those who decide what gets produced and how its presented. What are the costs of a misinformed and variously manipulated citizenry, of distortions to the free-market?

Knowledge and discourse are the lifeblood of both democracy, free markets, progress. The web, from the little scammy websites to the big brand ones that so many blindly trust, has a huge influence on who we vote for, what we buy, and most importantly, what we believe.

There is no free lunch, and there is no free web. This "free" ad-"supported" web we have is much too expensive.

—

[1] http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-proposal

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484075

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484442

[4] Lloyd made his pitch, proposing a quantum version of Google’s search engine whereby users could make queries and receive results without Google knowing which questions were asked. The men were intrigued. But after conferring with their business manager the next day, Brin and Page informed Lloyd that his scheme went against their business plan. "They want to know everything about everybody who uses their products and services," he joked. - Wired, http://www.wired.com/2013/10/computers-big-data/all/

[5] Google's once famous clean and neutral search results are now cluttered and biased (http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/10/new-banner-ads-push-...).

danudey• 12 years ago

I don't have a problem with advertising; what I have a problem with is the huge increase in page load times with all the third-party garbage loaded. Up to ten additional seconds on some sites, which is preposterous.

I install Adblock because doing so makes web browsing somewhere around five times faster, which means I can finish it sooner and get back to work/play.

My hope is that adblocking will encourage advertisers to come up with better ways to advertise (technologically speaking) rather than synchronous files that prevent some web pages from loading at all on mediocre 3G connections, making life far more frustrating for everyone involved.

Executor3• 12 years ago

We are living in a world where resource depletion is a serious concern on the health and well-being of humanity. Advertisement encourages resource depletion. Therefore we shouldn't support advertisement at all.

baal80spam• 12 years ago

Dear god... Why haven't I found this plugin before? This is pure awesomeness - makes up for lack of NoScript for Chrome...

I can finally disable ABP and Disconnect - ever since I used them, my web experience in general felt definitely more sluggish.

Thanks!

Sarkie• 12 years ago

The thing with all these plugins, I shouldn't care as a user, I should be informed about these issues.

If you use http://www.sublimetext.com/ you will get a dialog when scripts are running slow, as in, "Script XYZ took more than 1 second to process this file, you can disable it"

All I want in FF or Chrome is the same.

"Adblock blocked the UI for 4 seconds" "Adblock increased memory consumption by double"

Or they could even be more harsh and kill plugins that take too long and impact user experience like the Flash timeout.

enscr3• 12 years ago

Chrome shows the memory consumption of plugin here : chrome://memory-redirect/

I don't think most users want pop-ups about technical details in browsers. Sublime text is a different story - it's meant for tech folks.

kevingadd• 12 years ago

Plugin memory usage tracking is only realistically possible for Chrome where plugins run in a sandbox with a really limited API. Even then, if the plugin manages to allocate memory inside a page's sandbox (for example, by injecting some CSS or JS in there), the reporting will be wrong.

The adblock plus problem is in fact one of those - it injects styles into pages in order to filter ads, which increases the memory footprint of the page. So neither Firefox nor Chrome can tell you 'adblock plus is increasing memory usage by X', because the memory usage is hidden along with everything else owned by the page, not by the addon.

SudoNick• 12 years ago

Earlier today, and for the first time I recall, Firefox presented me with a slow startup notification. I had some very demanding programs running at the time and knew to dismiss the message without a moments thought. Some users might have responded to the notification.

I didn't click through to the help information at the time, but checking the source it looks like it takes you to https://support.mozilla.org/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix-most... which suggests a reset. Some users might have gone down that path without recognizing that it would leave them without security related extensions and/or preference changes they had made. Not to mention other less important modifications. Most people don't even keep a log of their changes, making it difficult to get back to what they wanted.

Being informed of conditions that might need your attentions is desirable. However, that doesn't eliminate the need to understand why the conditions arose and what the consequences of different actions would be.

orbifold• 12 years ago

At least in Chrome you sometimes see a notification in the lower left hand corner, something along the lines of "waiting for Adblock extension".

DangerousPie• 12 years ago

Doesn't the new Internet Explorer do this? I don't really use it that much, but I remember seeing a message suggesting I disable a plugin that was causing slow load times.

Serow2252• 12 years ago

Yup, I believe you're right. It only pops up when it detects a problematic plugin. Although I can't remember if it monitors this continuously, or just when you launch IE.

phaed• 12 years ago

Prepare for the huge spike of user adoption. This is just incredible, never knew this existed. Super useful.

zorbo5• 12 years ago

HTTPSB just isn't userfriendly enough for me. I run Adblock (not plus though) + Ghostery, and perhaps they use more memory and CPU, but if they do I've never noticed nor cared about it. Their userfriendliness is amazing though. HTTPSB randomly cripples sites, much like NoScript, and I really can't be bothered to deal with that anymore.

With Adblock + Ghostery I feel completely in control. If I want to enable the Disqus script on a single page for a single session, Ghostery easily lets me do that. HTTPSB makes that hard, or perhaps I'm missing something.

Case in point: When I tried to post this comment, I got a "Dead link: users don't match" error which went away when I disabled HTTPSB.

jzelinskie• 12 years ago

I think a lot of people get the opposite feeling. HTTPSB lets you see everything in the matrix and toggle what you want to show. If you want the carefree experience you can use this strategy[0] to unblock everything and only rely on the blocklists to which you subscribe. I currently use this method and I all I really want now is a block list for cookies (and one as good as Ghostery's list).

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

pandog• 12 years ago

But I don't want to use a strategy, I want to click a button and have adverts blocked.

idlewan• 12 years ago

You can allow everything by default too with HTTPSB (it still will use blocklists and protect you), so that you won't have to enable stuff for a website to work.

nkvoll2• 12 years ago

I've been clicking around its user interface for a few minutes now, but I can't figure out how to do this..

Is it adding "whitelist *" somewhere or something similar?

doczoidberg2• 12 years ago

I first had problems with it too. You have to disable matrix filtering on all sites.

andreasvc2• 12 years ago

Is the extension equivalent to a /etc/hosts file at that point?

sabret00the• 12 years ago

Sorry to be slightly off-topic, but since you mention NoScript and are familiar with that, this (HTTPSB) and ABP, can I ask. Is HTTPSB more of a NoScript alternative or an ABP alternative?

zorbo5• 12 years ago

From the little experience I have with HTTPSB, I'd say that it was more of a NoScript alternative. It feels to me like a webbrowser firewall. They seem to have moved into the adblocking field now though. Here's how I see it:

* Adblock (Plus): Blocking ads, No / minimal user action required

* NoScript: Blocking scripts. Lots and lots of user action required.

* Ghostery: Block privacy intrusions. Basically an application-level firewall for the browser. In a normal firewall, you'd block e.g. port 80 from IP x.x.x.x. In an appliction firewall you simply block, for instance, bittorrent traffic. Minimal user interaction required, and where it is required, it's very easy to use.

* HTTPSB: A low-level web browser firewall ("block port 80 from IP x.x.x.x) that now also does (better) adblocking. The adblocking is on par with Adblock (plus): no user action required. The browser "firewall" is basically unusable. Lots of user interaction required, and when it is required, it's basically impossible to understand.

beagle3• 12 years ago

I have the impression it's mostly a RequestPolicy replacement; but not using Chrome I haven't actually had a chance to use it.

gorhill4• 12 years ago

Well the article was specifically to challenge the claim that the problem of ABP memory consumption was mostly residing with Firefox.

But in any case, regarding your point, you can set up HTTPSB as an ad blocker and forget about it:

https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/wiki/HTTP-Switchb...

Advantage over ABP is that it discloses to you what is still not blocked, and you act on this information if you wish so.

u124556• 12 years ago

I think the point is they can port the code back to ABP so it can benefit from it. It's not a competition.

deathanatos• 12 years ago

Could someone explain why Adblock injects CSS rules into the document? I presume it's to hide the ads, but what I don't understand is why that's the way it hides the ads. Why not simply remove the element containing the ad¹ instead? Additionally, presuming my earlier assumption is correct, if you hide the element with CSS, doesn't the browser still need to fetch the ad?

¹Get rid of as much crap ad HTML as possible. Ads seem to come layered in all manner of divs and iframes.

Drakim• 12 years ago

Removing the ad from the DOM might cause JavaScript errors that fudges up the site. By making the element invisible it's still "there".

seszett• 12 years ago

Hiding elements is the safest way not to break the page layout.

It also doesn't cause the browser to reapply the CSS over the whole page, which it needs to do when markup changes.

lauriswtf• 12 years ago

What other options do you see? Searching and manipulating DOM in JavaScript wouldn't be faster than a single CSS stylesheet. Remember that there are >20K rules in play.

drdaeman2• 12 years ago

20K rules probably isn't that big, when you compile that to an automata. Most nodes are probably behind the edges that never traversed.

If there would be an option for a extension to hook into DOM element creation (i.e. when browser parses HTML and builds a tree, it'd call some user-defined predicate function) - that would possibly solve the issue.

I believe CSS is slow because of cascading nature - it requires re-compiling it from the very plaintext source on every page view, to combine ad-blocking rules with others - this certainly could be optimized (if browser side would provide tools for that). No idea about horrendous memory usage, though.

nnethercote3• 12 years ago

My understanding is that ADP removes elements wherever possible, and the CSS rules are there to catch the cases that remain. But that's about as far as my knowledge extends.

guelo2• 12 years ago

Not sure how a Chrome-only plugin is supposed to help with Firefox memory consumption.

pritambaral2• 12 years ago

By setting an example of how element-hiding blocklists should be implemented

gorhill4• 12 years ago

It's a problem specific to ABP (both in Firefox and Chrome).

I posted links to the (GPLv3) javascript code at the end of the article, and explained that it is rather modular, i.e. easy to import and adapt.

randunel• 12 years ago

The only reason I'm using an ad blocker is because of Youtube's ads. I think the whole marketing industry took a big hit when Google introduced ads to Youtube, because lots of people were forced to install the ad blockers. All of my friends use ABP now......

AndrewDucker• 12 years ago

Okay, so how can we get the ABP people to do likewise?

I'd love to see a reaction from them explaining either why they can't do it, why it wouldn't help, or when they're planning on doing it...

notfoss• 12 years ago

Wladimir Palant(ABP dev) gives a short response here:

https://adblockplus.org/blog/on-the-adblock-plus-memory-cons...

drdaeman2• 12 years ago

Apples and oranges.

ABP filters out (or, more correctly, modifies by styling them to not display) DOM elements, HTTPSB filters out HTTP requests. That's two completely different approaches, each with its own pros and cons, but neither is a real replacement for the other one (although both apples and oranges are suitable for eating).

On an unrelated note, a fun approach to fix ABP would be to introduce non-cascading style sheets, possibly with limited styling capabilities, specifically for adblocking. Those could be well-precompiled and run extremly fast while taking much less memory. But that would require hacking browser internals, so that's not gonna happen.

bikamonki• 12 years ago

Why bother installing an ad blocker if your brain already has an ad ignorer plugin? Furthermore, this ad ignorer software is quite good at learning: the advertirzers may shift place and shape but it will only fool you once, or none. Hence the need of massive user bases on 'free' online services, because only a tiny percentage of brains fall for the ads and even a tinier chunk of these clickers turn into buyers.

maratc• 12 years ago

I solve the issue with a (free) OpenDNS account where everything in the (crowd-sourced) "Advertisers" list is just resolved to 127.0.0.1. This works for phones, tablets, and any browser on any OS in my home network.

The problem is what to do once I leave my home network.

laurent123456• 12 years ago

To reduce the number of filters in Adblock, a simple way is to let it run for a few days with a popular black list such as EasyList. Then open the list in the preferences, sort it by number of hits, and unselect all the filters with 0 hits (there are so many of them, that probably something like 99% of them never get any hits). You can select the filters, and press "Space" to disable them all in one go.

D9u• 12 years ago

With AdBlock+ and HTTPSB you still get the network traffic from unwanted sites.

AdSuck, from the good folks at Conformal, blocks unwanted connections and thus decreases unwanted network traffic.

https://github.com/conformal/adsuck

antiufo• 12 years ago

As a temporary workaround for AdBlock (and for Firefox since it's not supported by HTTPSB), here's EasyList stripped out of all its CSS rules. It obviously lets some banners slip through, but most of them are still blocked.

http://www.xamasoft.com/adblock/easylist-nocssrules.txt

specto• 12 years ago

I like it, though every once in a while something will be blocked in the middle of the screen and I can't dismiss the red blocked area to get to the actual content.

Show HN: Where Adblock+ injects 20K CSS rules, HTTPSB injects one

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