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Show HN: Adblock Fast

adblockfast.com

46 pointsbyoogle35 comments

µBlock Origin is conveniently missing from the benchmark table... we know you benchmarked it... so what's the outcome? Faster or slower? :)

It's faster than any traditional ad blocking method due to the way iOS9 "Content Blocking" has been implemented. Give this a read: http://blog.appgrounds.com/content-blockers-beat-adblocking/

  > It's faster than any traditional ad blocking

So is uBlock

uBlock is a traditional ad blocker. you can see how traditional ad blockers compare:

https://www.raymond.cc/blog/10-ad-blocking-extensions-tested...

uBlock Origin is NOT an ad-blocker, let alone traditional one.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode

It is when you compare to Content Blocking. Refer to http://blog.appgrounds.com/content-blockers-beat-adblocking/

All the benchmarks were run in Chrome (there are a few notes on methodology in-page).

We didn’t benchmark uBlock [Origin], but I just ”ran” the filesize benchmark :-):

* uBlock Origin: 1.41 MB

* uBlock: 3.54 MB

* Adblock Fast: 96.59 KB

Could you run the other ones as well? If you're positioning yourself as a faster alternative to ABP, it makes sense to compare yourself against other popular alternatives.

uBlock Origin is packaged with all the filter lists which are selected by default: EasyList, EasyPrivacy, Peter Lowe's, etc. This ensures that it will work out of the box immediately even if the respective remote servers are not responding, not an uncommon occurrence with the server hosting EasyList et al.

The size of the package is not a factor to performance -- removing EasyList, EasyPrivacy, etc. from the package would not make uBlock Origin faster or slower.

No one cares about 3 megabytes of disk usage. I did a quick memory "benchmark" for you. This is loading TechCrunch in 64 bit Chrome for Mac:

* uBlock Origin: 92,9 MB

* Adblock Fast: 54,7 MB

Considering uBlock Origin packs a lot of functionality (and lists) which your extension lacks, you don't really have much advantage (if any).

Also, consuming a "lower percentage of CPU" is counterproductive. Adblockers should peak the CPU for the smallest amount of time possible, not use a little percentage of CPU time during a longer period of time as you advertise. That's just ridiculous.

It's clear they haven't made a "better, faster" adblock, just one they can pass off as "faster" with misleading benchmarks all for the goal of not fighting on behalf of the user, but for advertising their app firm.

So your claim is that the performance difference between Adblock Fast and uBlock is a wash because uBlock only uses 70% more memory? Heh.

92 MB is atypical.

There are a whole lot of pitfalls to take care before comparing memory figures between two extensions, and in all my benchmarks I take care to avoid these pitfalls in order to not fool myself, as I use these benchmarks to drive development.

Simply bringing up the popup UI of an extension will cause temporary memory usage increase. Auxiliary extension pages will also cause temporary memory usage increase -- for example when uBlock Origin's logger is open. The process of updating filter lists also will cause temporary increase in memory usage. Garbage collection may take a while to kick in. Also, if one opens the developer console of an extension, memory usage for the extension may increase permanently despite the extension not having allocated any memory (I noticed this with the Element inspector).

How long an extension has been running also influence memory usage (memory fragmentation). What feature has been used will also cause jump in memory usage -- for example if a whole page has been blocked by uBlock, the look-up of the filter lists which contain the filter which caused the block will cause a Worker instance to come alive and linger in memory for over 10 minutes. Etc. etc.

Now using your TechCrunch example I get:

Adblock Fast: 20.8 MB + TechCrunch page itself: 75,4 MB = 96.2

uBlock Origin: 48,3 MB + TechCrunch page itself: 68,0 MB = 116.3

Adblock Plus: 77,7 MB + TechCrunch page itself: 85,5 MB = 163.2

I did not look at page load speed, but common sense is that the more resources are blocked, the faster page loads. ABP is probably also handicaped because it injects 14,000+ CSS rules before the DOM content is fully loaded (something not affecting uBlock Origin or Adblock Fast).

Methodology:

- Chrome 45 64-bit: only one tab open, "chrome://extensions" (click-to-play on. i.e. no Flash applet will run).

- Bring up the browser's Task Manager (Shift-Esc).

- Activate target extension (all other extensions are disabled).

- Wait 1 minute.

- Open new tab, paste "http://techcrunch.com/" in address bar.

- Wait 1 minute.

- Write down memory figures from Task Manager.

- Deactivate the target extension.

Details specific to each extension:

- Adblock Fast: default settings (there are no settings).

- uBlock Origin: default settings = EasyList, EasyPrivacy, Peter Lowe's, Malware lists (this is a "mature" install, i.e. uBlock loaded its resources from a "selfie").

- Adblock Plus: EasyList, EasyPrivacy, Malware list, "Acceptable ads" turned off.

The article you linked too says:

> In contrast, adblockers like Adblock Plus rely on javascript’s built in regular expression parser

This is not accurate for uBlock Origin. A majority of network filters in EasyList, EasyPrivacy, etc. do not need to be implemented as regular expressions, and for these uBlock Origin does not use a regular expression, it's simply a straightforward string comparison.

Also, there are further optimizations when a filter is just a hostname (these are common too, especially in HOSTS files which can be parsed by uBlock).

The seven rules:

https://github.com/rocketshipapps/adblockfast/blob/master/op...

Are these regular expressions machine-compiled?

Yes, they are.

Is a regex much faster than a simple list?

Ha ha, I came just to post exactly this. This seems like a cool product, and kudos to the OP for releasing it freely and as open software...but I'm considerably less inclined to trust software that uses such misleading copy. The fact that it is the very first benchmark listed is also not promising and makes me reflexively doubt the other benchmarks.

So what if they aren't? I haven't read the expressions in depth but they look like on a quick glance like they could be checked in linear time. It may have a high degree of branching, but so what when you are checking a single linear path through it for each URL?

This is correct. According to this article[0], posted in another comment[1], iOS 9's content blocker regular expressions are limited to a subset of regex for which matching can be done in linear time:

"Extremely powerful, regular expressions can surprisingly be done in linear time if you use a strict set of regular expression characters through Thompson’s NFA algorithm. Safari’s Content Blocker implementation in fact imposes this strict regular expression limitation ..."

0. http://blog.appgrounds.com/content-blockers-beat-adblocking/

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10192562

Sorry, I'm not using an extension built for marketing your company, even if it is GPL licensed.

Also, I get that regex is how you do it on iOS9 and it's fast on there because of Apple's specific regex implementation, but you're misleading people that your 7 humongous regex are going to be faster than flagship blockers (uBlock Origin) on the desktop.

How is this compare to no-script?

My ff with no-script is 10-50 times faster than chrome on most of the websites. Should be safer too.

Is there any no-script options for iOS? (default with JS off but selectively turn on for just a few trust websites.)

> How is this compare to no-script?

Adblockers and Noscript are not in the same category. Adblockers are useful for everyone, and shouldn't break things as long as the block list is well curated. Noscript is for highly technical users who know they're going to break many sites they visit and are prepared to deal with the pain of doing so and debugging the result because they consider it worth the cost.

Yeah, I'd really like to see this benchmarked against µBlock Origin. I'm fine with switching if it truly is faster and works comparably, but until I see proof of that, I see no reason to switch over.

The authors of this product should run their adblocker against all of them here: https://www.raymond.cc/blog/10-ad-blocking-extensions-tested...

so this is an ad block advertising itself. feels contradictory.

"maybe doing good work and shipping good products ought to replace advertising" is the best thing I've ever come across in fine print.

No evidence that it makes any difference compared to uBlock Origin on desktop.

Why wants this extension run in background when i close Chrome on Windows?

Are there any other notable iOS blockers to compare this against?

This is not a valid Show HN until you have something for people to try out. People can't try out an email signup, which is why email signups are explicitly excluded by the rules:

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

There’s an install button for both Chrome and Opera at the top of the page. Wtf?

Sure, but the story you submitted was "Show HN: Adblock Fast – An iOS 9 ad blocker", and there isn't an iOS ad blocker, only an email signup and a demo image. Unless I'm missing something, that's a plain violation of the most important rule.

Users email us to complain when they see posts that break this, because "Show HN" is an implicit contract that they'll be able to try a piece of software out. (The standards are looser for non-software projects.)

Understood, but the title got edited a couple times – could you edit back to something more neutral? (E.g., at one point the title was plain, old “Show HN: Adblock Fast”.)

There are three things at the top of page that are brand new and people can try out (plus we sent almost 100 copies of the iOS app so far to people who signed up this morning):

* https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nneejgmhfoecfeoffa...

* https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/details/adblock-fast/

* https://github.com/rocketshipapps/adblockfast

Ok, we've put the title back to "Show HN: Adblock Fast" and restored the post.

The logs turned out to be more complicated than I thought. You submitted "Show HN: A preview of our iOS 9 ad blocker". That did break the rules—a "preview" can't be a Show HN when the "preview" is an email signup and an image. A moderator changed that to "Adblock Fast", and then a moderator changed it to "Show HN: Adblock Fast – An iOS 9 ad blocker".

Since you do have new things for people to try out, though, it seems like making the title more general is the best solution.

Cool, ty!

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