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Comment by johnnybgoode | Hacker News Reader

I'll ask the question on everyone's minds. Can an ad-blocking extension be made?

Adsweep (almost similar functionality as Adblock) is a greasemonkey script that works well for chrome. They have also released a extension for chrome. http://www.adsweep.org

Thanks. I took a look and the Chrome extension is basically the same as the greasemonkey script. Does anyone know if this is less efficient than the way Adblock Plus does it? If so, is it possible to do it more efficiently with a Chrome extension?

Yes, AdBlock is more efficient because it doesn't load the ads at all while Chrome/greasemonkey load and hide them. No, I don't think it can be more efficient because chrome extensions like greasemonkey scripts cannot modify the page before it is loaded.

I may be wrong, I had only a cursory look at the technology.

Damn, that's what I was afraid of. Thanks.

"No, I don't think it can be more efficient because chrome extensions like greasemonkey scripts cannot modify the page before it is loaded."

Thus guaranteeing I will never use Chrome.

Plain Chrome feels faster than FF with AdBlock even on relatively ad-heavy sites.

I agree. Chrome is just incredibly fast, and Firefox, on the three major OS's in my life, feels slow after a couple hours of use.

In practice, I always have at least 2 different browsers open, one of them usually Firefox, but Chrome is the fastest one, used for surfing, while FF for web-dev/management-y stuff.

What about "@run-at document-start"?

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=4478#c5

You're right, I don't know if this is enough (do you get hooks upon loading each resource, etc) but they are definitely working to implement this properly.

Privoxy is pretty easy to set up, and works with any browser.

http://www.privoxy.org/

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