Firefox 41 will use less memory when running AdBlock Plus | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 41 will use less memory when running AdBlock Plus

blog.mozilla.org

247 pointsnnethercote162 comments

This is good but do not use Adblock Plus. Use µBlock. Adblock Plus let's through some 'kosher' ads. If that's acceptable to you, all good. If you want no ads whatsoever, use µBlock.

It works out of the box and blocks everything. Uses even less resources that any other alternative.

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...

Under "filter preferences" there is an option for "Allow some non-intrusive markerting". Is that what you're talking about?

I've unchecked this option since I used AdBlock Plus (years ago, I'm sure) and I've never seen an ad. The closest thing I've seen is "please disable your adblocker" banners.

And then I used block element on those.

You can disable that. The only questionable part is who decides what ads should be allowed when that setting is on. Here I agree, if AdBlock developers are paid for whitelisting, such practice is very questionable. Are they?

What do you think? WINK WINK.

https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads#criteria and https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads-agreements

They are indeed being paid. But they claim they provide some review process. It's still looks quite questionable in general.

Yes, Adblock Plus' whitelist has been compared many times to a mafia style extortion scheme. Companies pay to let their ads through. By using ABP over other copies of the same open source code (or competitors like uBlock), you are supporting this business model.

They are.

Source: My employer (a major site with Alexa rank <100) contacted ABP asking to have our text-only, clearly-delimited sponsored search results whitelisted. They told us that it wouldn't happen unless we signed an NDA, paid them a share of the revenue difference, and installed a third-party script on our site to allow them to track our users. (We just laughed at them and changed our markup to work around the block.)

I love the NDA part. Looks very transparent and opensourcy..

I wonder if there would be interest in a real community driven whitelist. One without money involved or a dominant company applying it.

edit: This might work under the premises that there is (1) such a tool/list itself (2) a maintaining community and (3) a set of adblockers to support the list.

(1) is pretty simple. It's a list of ad-placements followed by a set of exclusion filters. This one needs to be transparently editable and commentable (both the ad-placement and the filter list edits)

(2) is a bet, I admit. I could imagine that if there is a serious interest in the allowance of unintrusive ads than this would be not a problem if enough reach is provided.

(3) is again an easy one. There are only so many adblockers out there. One key differentiator to ABP is that they don't allow ads on default. If that stays the same and the exception list is treated as an opt-in addition, I can only imagine benefits for those blockers. The only losing party is ABP since their overall impact might be reduced due to the lost of their monopoly. Since lists need to be transparent, their list could be used to start off and improve further maintainance.

> so many adblockers out there [...] key differentiator to ABP is that they don't allow ads on default

Adguard has "acceptable ads" enabled by default.

That's insane! Do you have the e-mail they sent? I'd like to show it to some people.

Amazing. I'll share this with people.

I tried uBlock origin and I didn't find any advantages over adblock plus besides not having to disable an option to block most ads... but either way, noscript is still necessary

I have a question about NoScript. I run Ghostery which blocks all tracking and analytics js files, preventing most of the tracking I'd like to avoid. What does NoScript offer here? Seems like you'd want to block analytics even if you're browsing a "trusted" site.

First of all ghostery is far more beholden to advertisers than ABP. On that basis alone they can't be trusted. It also only screens for known vulnerabilities which leaves you open to js zero days that noscript would have prevented if you are aggressive about what you permit to run.

No disagreement on Ghostery; that got uninstalled real fast when I figured out what they were really up to. While I agree that NoScript helps, it doesn't prevent everything either: https://thehackerblog.com/the-noscript-misnomer-why-should-i...

I used to be a big RequestPolicy believer, but single-page apps (which feels like saying "horseless carriages" in mid-2015) make it a lot of work. https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/wiki/Changes-from-HTTP-Sw... is the best thing I've found if you're into granular control over sites. uBlock also has an ~"I'm an advanced user" option which will give you a little more blunt but still useful control over cross-site requests.

> While I agree that NoScript helps, it doesn't prevent everything either: https://thehackerblog.com/the-noscript-misnomer-why-should-i....

This is just a default whitelist that's trivial to remove. Yes, it's dumb, but it doesn't completely compromise NoScript if you're aware of the whitelist.

I think you're expecting it to solve a problem it's not intended to solve.

I'm not expecting it to block all javascript, or all malicious javascript. I'm just expecting it to block most or all of the annoying stuff on the web.

To the extent that this is the job it's being hired for, you don't really need to 'trust' it. You run it and it either does what you want or it doesn't. Personally it suits my needs perfectly.

no. noscript is not necessary. ublock can block every javascript until I allow it for a website. I had 3 addons before I started using uBlock: noscript, ABP and request-policy. uBlock replaced them all and is much better. It has a nice clear interface and gives an even biiger amount of control.

How do you get it to block JS by default? I wasn't aware of that option, and I don't see it in the settings. Do you use a custom rule for that?

Maybe she meant uMatrix.

Turn on the dynamic filtering and set the appropriate global rules:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Advanced-user-feature...

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-qu...

(I'd be more specific if I was using the dynamic filtering and understood it more clearly)

yes. I enabled "Im an experienced user" option. Then one can see a matrix with two columns in the uBlock menu. Left one is global. I set everything (including javascript) to red (disabled) in the global column. When visiting specific sites I can allow some resources (like javascript) locally (only for that domain) in the right column.

that would only make the Application Boundaries Enforcer and ClearClick (anti-clickjacking) missing from uBlock origin, if you don't install noscript [1]

[1] https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/issues/1323

NoScript related HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9794895

uBlock Origin is noticably faster, especially on mobile. It also has many more configuration options.

ublock does not work very well. ...adblock and adblock plus work, but I cannot find anything else that works well...

Can you be more specific? What does ublock do poorly?

I find it works well for me with a minimum of fuss. I even got it to block those awful "Powered by Outbrain" clickbait links that have been showing up on news sites lately.

It blocks those? Thanks, you've sold me. I find them incredibly annoying because sometimes it looks like an interesting list on the site I'm currently visiting and then realize it's taking me through 3 other portals.

Last time I tried it, it seemed to be filtering out too much javascript. Like I would occasionally click on buttons on legit sites and they would do nothing.

If anyone prefers Adblock Plus over µBlock but wants to get rid of the 'kosher' ads as you say, Adblock Edge is a fork that does just that.

> This addon has been discontinued

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

Oh. Well, their official endorsement of uBlock is enough for me to switch. ABE has served me well over the past couple of years, though.

ABE has been great and even after their controversial whitelist was added it was always very simple to disable. But ABE never innovated or focused on performance and so now uBlock (Origin) is all you should consider running.

You mean AdBlock Plus' controversial whitelist.

AdBlock Edge was a fork to precisely avoid this whitelist.

Correct, I had them mixed up.

is there a difference between uBlock and uBlock origin? Everyone has different opinions on which ad blocker is the best one and i'm pretty confused..

First there was uBlock. Then the maintainer got tired of it and passed it on to someone else. That next maintainer made some changes in the first couple weeks that made the original guy not happy about the direction he was taking it. So the original guy tried to take it back, but ended up forking it and calling it uBlock Origin.

That's my best recollection, I might have some details wrong. I believe Origin is the favored one right now.

And the first thing the guy who took over the original uBlock did was ask for donations, for code that was mostly written by someone else.

Better use uBlock Origin, which is developed by the original uBlock author.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

The maintainer of uBlock Origin needs to do a much better job of explaining the difference between uBlock and uBlock Origin. The extensions' descriptions on addons.mozilla.org are word-for-word identical:

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

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin

he already did...

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-vs.-uBlock-Ori...

Interesting. He still hasn't answered why a user should pick one or the other. If he wanted to focus on refactoring and larger features, he could have enlisted a "lieutenant" to manage bug fixes and releases while he works in a dev branch. The uBlock "brand" had quickly become the "new, memory-efficient ad blocker", but now the brand has been divided and muddied. This seems like a good example of the problems with 'product line extension', where a new extension should have used a new name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_line_extension

I don't understand why he doesn't just re-po the repo (ha) from the guy he gave it to. it would solve the strange monetization problem and fix the schism the two projects have created for end users.

uBlock vs. uBlock Origin: Facts

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-vs.-uBlock-Ori...

Yes, I like to support sites like reddit that vet their ads to eliminate the obnoxious ones. In an ideal world, I'd like the speed/memory usage of µBlock with the ability to enable the 'kosher' ads. When 41 goes to stable I'll re-enable ABP.

This is rather easy. The ability to enable kosher ads is implemented through an additional filter list you can add in any blocker:

  https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/exceptionrules.txt

All ads are obnoxious. Abp charges for the privilege of allowing ads through.

Sure, there's no difference between a small image and a full-screen flash animation that needs to be clicked through to proceed

They both work to make me change my buying decisions. Yes there is no difference.

Sure, they use the same amount of cpu and bandwidth, they have the same effect when seen from peripheral vision (or even audio), and also have the same effect on the usability of the page, sure

Please keep denying the bleeding obvious (oh and they clearly have different effects on buying decisions)

I will fight anyone who tries to tell me that a auto-playing video with sound enabled is not just as annoying as a small static image on the side of a page. Even when I'm somewhere with a limited internet connection. [sarcasm]

You're arguing semantics. Yes they are more annoying but they are all effective in making you change your thinking/buying habits and decisions. I don't want any of it, "good" or bad.

I actually don't believe that's entirely true either, or at least not as "bad" as you seem to think. Sure, any sort of advertiser would like you to use that product/service, but it's isn't necessarily trying to impact the way you think. There are plenty of ad campaigns that are simply trying to be made known. Without that, how would you expect any product to reach some sort of critical mass? Word of mouth alone?

Firefox, for example, used several different marketing avenues including a newspaper ad to try to make people aware of them. As far as I recall, that was all they were trying to do, let people know another browser option was out there. It seems a stretch to consider that as trying to manipulate your thinking.

https://ffp4g1ylyit3jdyti1hqcvtb-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/pre...

That's completely opinionated ad and not just a notice that this product exists. I'm not going to stare at this stuff all day. You feel free.

I'm not a fan too. But I come to realize that it can be an easy way to support sites you like without having to spend one penny, just by disabling your adblocker. If there are companies willing to give money to websites I like by displaying little images that I won't even look at - so be it.

Ads work even for if not especially for those who think they don't. I'd rather support people by paying for their work directly instead of going through middle ad-men.

Personally I am less concerned about obnoxious ads than annoyed by ad websites tracking me. And I do not think that there is any "Kosher tracking".

How about self-hosted Piwik?

The problem to me is the tracking across websites. The fact that the website you visit recognizes you and tracks which pages you visit on its site is perfectly fine to me. Particularly if I have an account (news website, ecommerce, etc).

But google analytics, facebook, twitter, adclick, etc all track your activity across websites and to me should be at the top of any decent ad blocker.

I don't think the average Reddit user knows what an ad blocker is these days? I wouldn't feel guilty blocking their ads? I have a feeling they are making a lot of money?

As of November 2012, Reddit was not profitable. http://www.quora.com/How-profitable-is-reddit-com. And as of mid July 2013, they were still in the red: http://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-admits-were-still-....

People can buy gold (a month of "reddit premium") to thank others for their contributions. In October 2013, they launched the "reddit daily gold goal" bar that displays how much gold is needed every day to pay for all (server?) costs (http://www.redditblog.com/2013/10/thanks-for-gold.html). I don't know if it includes other costs or just server costs actually. I've looked for some statistics over time to see whether the goal is being reached often or not but I can't find a graph.

They've got a couple other revenue sources like merchandising and their own advertisement system. But it would seem Reddit is not a massively profitable business at this point.

I don't think I've ever seen it not reach at least 100% of the daily goal.

I am not 100% convinced that they will ever (officially) be profitable (or that they would need to be).

There is a lot of corporate crap that makes the front page, I expect that reddit receives remuneration for this. e.g. there was a front page post recently of a TacoBell sign that was 20 years old, a crap post with little value, but it ends up with +2000 votes and is front paged on a friday(i think). What do you think that sort of exposure is worth to Tacobell? If Tacobell did pay for some product placement of this nature do you think reddit would ever tell its users? Nope, that would pretty much kill any future attempt to do this sort of thing.

Whether the Tacobell payment is official or hidden by way of increased ad costs on other CondeNest properties or even if it is offered as a sort of add-on to their usual advertising in print media. Reddit is selling their front page one way or another becuase it is pretty much their cash cow, however milking it must be done very carefully because a user backlash would kill the site or future opportunities to monetise in this manner.

That's just speculation though. It could be happening, sure, but that sounds very risky, and doesn't pass Occam's razor as far as I'm concerned. On Twitter, time and time again, some people will retweet / fav corporate stuff because it's funny or makes them feel good / outraged / etc. Some people love to associate with or promote a brand they like.

Maybe Taco Bell puts a lot of work in creating content that works well on the Reddit frontpage (which would definitely be manipulative, but hey, what are you gonna do), and maybe their own employees at home are upvoting it ("it's for the good of the company"), but I very much doubt the top people at Reddit are making a business out of this, if only because they couldn't justify it to their employees.

It just seems more likely to me that 1) a lot of material is organically upvoted, and it includes corporate stuff from well-known compagnies because a lot of people relate to them 2) some companies are (trying to) game the system in various ways that violate the spirit but not the letter 3) Reddit is trying to extract profit from all that but isn't being very aggressive about it because they don't have very high operating costs, are VC-backed and they'd rather find something that's compatible with the spirit of the platform and sustainable in the long run.

> There is a lot of corporate crap that makes the front page, I expect that reddit receives remuneration for this.

That's almost certainly false. Even if you believe the people running Reddit have no morals, the money from promoting Taco Bell can't possibly be close to enough to the legal and business risk to getting caught.

after discovering /r/hailcorporate a lot of submissions seem like there are some behind-the-scene helps to get to the front page

I wonder if their administrative changes are going to result in decreased or increased profitability.

Disable uBlock for those sites? Takes two clicks. It's better you make the decision than someone who's getting paid to let ads through.

How will I know which sites have acceptable ads that I'm OK with, if I start by blocking all ads by default? Word of mouth?

You can disable ad blocking for sites you regularly use. When the ads on a site are annoying, simply re-enable blocking for that site until you feel like giving them another chance.

µBlock blocks Google Analytics, what about Adblock Plus?

The extension doesnt block google analytics, the lists do.

uBlock and Adblock Plus are built around filter lists of urls (in fact, both use essentially the same lists). So if something is blocked in one but not the other, it's probably a difference in the filter list subscriptions. This is easily configurable in both.

This is good but do not use Adblock Plus. Use µBlock. Adblock Plus let's through some 'kosher' ads.

I've heard this argument many times. I've used ABP for years and I don't remember ever seeing an ad (except on reddit, where I whitelist them).

Either the ads are so low key that I didn't see them, or they are very rare. Either way, I'm fine with it.

That's because there have been always a checkbox to disable those 'kosher' and you've probably disabled them many years ago.

That doesn't stop other people from spreading FUD, though.

This is good but do not use µBlock. Use µBlock Origin. µBlock's developer lets through some changes the creator of µBlock didn't like. If that's acceptable to you, all good. If you like the original µBlock, use µBlock Origin.

ABP is very good about this these days, and takes you straight to the option to switch that off if you want it (last time I installed it afresh).

Also remember that Google paid 30 million € to get some of their ads whitelisted — obviously not a fair selection of "kosher" ads.

Sigh. Adblock Plus / µBlock are almost as broken as not using them.

I only want to block obnoxious ads. First and foremost, popunder (these should not even exist, I don't see any legitimate use for them) and also popups. Let's add the very aggressive ones (blinking content).

I don't want to block the ads on my favorite blogs and I really don't like the fact that I have to create a custom rule to do so.

Funnily, the guy who owns AdBlock Plus also worked in the department of United Internet which invented Binlayer back in the day.

The issue I see mostly is that they actually sell access to the "acceptable ads" list. If it was just actually acceptable ads, it would have been okay, but mafia-like methods? that’s just morally inacceptable.

You can disable the "kosher" ads, there's a checkbox in ABP's settings. Pretty simple. Just uncheck "Allow some non-intrusive advertising" http://imgur.com/BWzIEyo

http://vimcolorschemetest.googlecode.com/svn/html/index-c.ht... - the page referenced in the article that shows extreme AdBlock overhead - Chrome just chokes on it for a long time - the tab uses 1.7GB of memory while it is still loading!

With uBlock and FF 38 - the page load completes faster and only about 850MB memory is used in total!

Chrome people should really be doing something about the memory and battery usage on the desktop. It's getting ridiculous.

Also I wonder how things such as OS X's Compressed Memory feature affect this in real life. I mean without the fix, the OS will notice the duplicated, in-memory style sheets and compress them to reduce memory usage and you should not see much of an improvement due to this patch on platforms like OS X that implement memory compression.

(Looking at activity monitor with FF loading the vim color scheme test shows 0MB Compressed Mem for FF - not sure if FF opts out or if there simply isn't enough memory pressure for the OS to start compressing FF's mem.)

> Chrome just chokes on it for a long time - the tab uses 1.7GB of memory while it is still loading!

Chrome 43.0.2357.130 m (64-bit) on Windows 8.1 here, takes 787.6 MB for me (with uBlock). If I open an Incognito window (i.e. no extensions) it takes 109 MB. Not sure where this discrepancy is coming from. Chrome's responsive the whole time.

http://i.imgur.com/QFG2ryq.png

I was testing on OS X - On Windows 8.1 the page kept loading for a while and then the tab crashed - it used 767Mb before crashing. Probably the extensions you are running are different from me as well - I am running uBlock, Privacy Badger, Lastpass and ChromeCast.

Edit: The crash on Windows 8.1 is reproducible for me. Turns out I'm running a 32-bit build on Windows. But that just very likely means the crash is due to it exceeding the 32-bit process address space limit. I've seen it reach 900+Mb but since the reporting is not real time in chrome://memory it's hard to know at what point it crashes.

I have no idea how I get as low as 109 MB on the page. As for extensions: HackerNew, uBlock (not Origin), Wait! Google Sent Me and Wunderlist New Tab.

In any case since extensions are separate processes I am more perplexed as to how you are getting that low memory usage for the VIM tab. Make sure you wait for the page to load - it takes some time for me to start reaching 900Mb levels and the tab is still loading at that point.

I waited the first time. If I scroll to the bottom of the page I get 98,232 KB. Highest I can get now. Task Manager says close to the same thing, and my computer isn't under memory pressure so I don't expect Windows to have paged out a bunch of Chrome's memory.

http://i.imgur.com/EhHI1Pr.png

http://imgur.com/im0YFhw - 1.6GB on 64-bit build. I get 107Mb in an incognito tab as well. That has got to be a bug - more than 10 times mem usage on regular tab!

1.6GB on 64-Bit Chrome on Windows as well - http://imgur.com/im0YFhw .

The discrepancy is courtesy of the ad blocker extension.

Chrome extensions run in their own process which means the memory usage is reported separately for each tab and extension. IOW the memory usage for the tab is that of Chrome 100%.

Yes, they do run in their own process. But, so what? Did you expect the ram consumed by the extension to balloon? I didn't. It's clearly evident that these ad block extensions are inflating the memory used by the tab. So, again, why is Chrome to blame for these inefficient extensions?

I believe (most) ad blockers work by changing the DOM of each tab. They inject their own CSS to hide elements. The the stylesheets will be processed in the tab's process, not the extension's. This VIM page would be quite heavy on elements that need styling by CSS.

So you're blaming Chrome because your Ad Block Plus extension crippled and hosed it? Why don't you try running the same test with Ad Block plus disabled and share your results? That page renders in 112MB and scrolls blisteringly fast in Chrome 45 Dev. With Ad Block Plus installed it chokes it.

People need to stop blaming Chrome and start looking at the havoc their extensions are creating. Whenever I hear a Chrome performance or memory story it invariably always ties back to their extensions.

It's clear why Apple controls and limits modifications to their software. It's to prevent situations like these from erupting and giving their product a black eye because some inefficient extension is in over its head.

Well, for one I don't have Adblock installed. For two, chrome extensions run in their own process which means the memory usage is reported separately for each tab and extension. So the hosing is completely Chrome's fault - 32-bit version just crashes with the tab in question taking maximum memory.

Ok, let's recap:

1) Chrome with no ad blocking extension renders the page in about 112MB with fast scrolling.

2) Chrome with ad blocking extension installed inflates memory.

Seems pretty clear to me where the problem lies.

Also, the issue isn't about these extensions running in their own process as this is simply to prevent a bad extension from taking down the tab. It's about what these extensions are doing to the tab process.

read the comment again, especially the first sentence.

You must have missed the part where he said he's running uBlock.

Last time I checked, it was still an ad blocking extension.

You're missing the point. Chrome with uBlock uses double the memory compared to FF current version with uBlock.

My point has always been that uBlock is doing something to the Chrome tab process renderer that's causing it to consume a lot of memory. The very fact that the example page renders in only 112MB compared to >800MB with an ad blocker installed is proof of this. In the case of Chrome, with an ad blocker installed, they seem to be doing something to the DOM that causes the memory allocated for that renderer to balloon above 1GB. But, the very fact that these ad blockers cause this extreme spike in memory is alarming.

To the layman you would think the removal of ads from the DOM would reduce the amount of RAM consumed. But, just the opposite occurs. Why is this? What are these ad blockers doing exactly and why are they causing these rendering engines to spike in memory usage? But, one thing is clear, whatever they're doing it's the fault of the ad blocker and not Chrome.

Again. Please re-read the original article. Firefox is fixing their inefficient memory management w.r.t. CSS with a later version. That fixed version reduces the memory usage to 450Mb with the same Adblock code. So it wasn't exactly Adblock's fault - it was Mozilla's code that was grossly inefficient and they owned it and fixed it.

Same way, as it stands today, with uBlock FF 38.x loads that site in about 750Mb whereas Chrome with uBlock uses 1.6GB.

Unless you happen to know that uBlock is doing something crazy on Chrome but not on FF, and that Chrome code is 100% without inefficiencies - don't state it like a fact that it is uBlock that is the issue. uBlock is manipulating the DOM - Chrome is using memory for those elements, it is entirely up to them to optimize it if uBlock can work fine with less memory on Firefox while essentially doing the same thing.

Chrome isn't exactly known for being thrifty on memory and battery btw.

14 years old bug fixed. Congratulations! (I'm not sarcastic - it's always good when such bugs are fixed).

Thank you!

I would love to have a way to accept kosher ads with ublock origin (but not ads that have been whitelisted by paying ABP). It would be great if there was a transparent community driven ad whitelist.

I want to support content creators but I also do not want to have to deal with the more obnoxious ads (or flash ads or animated ads and so on). I currently support a few creators with patreon but that's only limited to a few.

Maybe one could write an addon that checks the contrast and other visual features of each ad, then blocks that site or network's ads indefinitely if an ad exceeds the thresholds.

How about non-ad ways to interact with the right communities, like a corresponding subreddit? To me that sounds more reasonable, since that way you increase the communication and your own awareness, but don't support spamming people with information they haven't requested.

You're basically describing ABP

I'm a convert to using "the great suspender" in chrome and the amount of memory it consumes for me has dropped dramatically. The tradeoff is waiting for a page to reload when I focus the tab, but it let's me keep dozens of tabs "open" at once, for long periods of time, without annihilating my system memory.

Combined with µBlock and click to activate plugins etc. Chrome almost behaves now.

Great Suspender + Spaces (from the same guy) makes Chrome usable again.

I'm always shocked at the age of some really important bugs. Large optimization potentials of many public / well used / open source systems have been noted for many years.

Consider that the web has changed a lot over the past 14 years. Back when this bug was filed, it was much less common to have many tabs open, and those tabs would have contained many fewer documents on average. So even if ABP had existed back then, the optimization potential would have been much smaller.

Tabs were introduced to Phoenix/Firefox in September 2002, so 14 years ago there were no tabs :-)

Multiple windows, sure, but the win98/2000/xp style of window management wasn't conductive to having 100 open windows, either.

I can finally go back to ABP!

Firefox used to crash a lot, and freeze a lot back when I was using ABP. ublock has never worked as well for me, I also dislike the element selector. Sometimes I want more than blocked something being displayed, like blocking a script. And ABP allowed that easier, that's something I miss.

yeah, uBlock Origin makes it a tiny little bit hard to undo what you've block, I find it easier by bookmarking the below which opens the settings page & remove the most recent lines you added / blocked

chrome://ublock0/content/dashboard.html

> Sometimes I want more than blocked something being displayed

That's what the logger is for: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/The-logger#creating-f...

As Chrome gets more and more bloated and slow, I think more and more people will switch (back) to Firefox

I'd wager the majority of Chrome users are simply normal people who had it shoved in their face when using Google web properties with Internet Explorer. These people are not aware of Firefox.

Anyone here prefer uBlock over UBlock Origin? I tried both and stuck with Origin since something like this should be relatively easy to reach "feature complete" status, thus go into pure maintenance mode. Either are a big step up from ABP.

If you compare their repo activity, it seems to suggest that the actual development happens at origin.

Origin: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/graphs/contributors

Nonorigin: https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/graphs/contributors

uBlock Origin does a more thorough job at blocking network connections [1] compared to uBlock since the former disables prefetching and the latter doesn't. [2] uBlock is also missing the per-site switches and strict domain blocking features from Origin. [3]

Personally I can't see any reason to use uBlock over uBlock Origin.

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases/tag/0.9.8.2

[2] https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/releases/tag/0.9.5.0

[3] https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/issues/1306

First, I believe everyone should be using uBlock (Origin) [1] anyways. Second, I'm looking forward to seeing how Firefox's built-in tracking protection will evolve[2]. Also, should be interesting to see how Safari's new blocking framework changes the game.

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection-fir...

I'm also curious to see how things evolve with the countermeasures: http://www.businessinsider.com/former-google-exec-launches-s... (a terrible idea imho).

Safari's new approach of using a built in (natively compiled) rules engine to block content seems more and more to be the best option. But it's also the kind of option you'd only see from a vendor who doesn't make any money from ads (Apple... and possibly MS).

What doesn't prevent these vendors to advertise their own products. Or make money by letting others pay. Apple, MS and {{any_big_company}} do everything that generates revenue. Even Mozilla has started to sell data and advertising space in Firefox. I don't care where the spam is coming from. And no Mozilla, I will certainly never book my next holiday trip on booking.com.

Advertising space, not data. Nobody is tracking you through the new tab page. Mozilla just populates it with some default ads (which can be removed or replaced with your own new tab customizations)

Actually Mozilla analyzes and stores the user's surfing data to allow it's customers to direct ads to the user's preferences. I actually don't understand why so few seem to bother. I think it's a quite big deal. Same with these telefonica chat thing.

Source?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-tiles-work-firef...

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/tiles/

Regular telemetry data. Not surfing data. And certainly not sold.

Hello doesn't collect data passively either; using the video chat can of course lead to data collection though I doubt it does (but you would have to assume that can happen for any non peer-to-peer service of this kind since there will always be a server side component which you can't verify)

Stop spreading FUD.

Is there a Chrome or Firefox equivalent to IE's "Personalized Tracking Protection List"? In short it tracks the resources loaded by sites you visit and if they show up on more than a configurable number of sites they get blocked. Basically, it only blocks what actually could be tracking you. I would love to have that functionality in Chrome or Firefox, especially if the tracking list could survive a reinstall (IE's cannot).

AFAIK EFF's Privacy Badger uses a similar mechanism to what you described.

Perfect! Thank you!

It's not clear to me from reading the article, if the headline is correct. From what I understand (non-native speaker) with the mentioned fix ABP uses less memory than last year without that fix. But does it make FF use less RAM in general, compared with FF with fix but without ABP? That's how I understand the headline, ABP makes you save RAM compared to using FF without ABP. But that's not how I understand the article.

Mmm, I see the ambiguity. It's meant to mean that "the combination of Firefox + AdBlock Plus will use less memory than it did previously", not "Firefox + AdBlock Plus will use less memory than Firefox alone".

The fix will also reduce the memory usage of Firefox when used without AdBlock Plus, but the difference will be small.

Fastmail web interface users + ABP|ABE|uBlock users:

When I have any of these three blockers installed, and then use mail composition on the Fastmail tab, the page jumps around while I type. Eventually the line that I'm typing has scrolled itself down to the bottom of the window, and sometimes even jumps between below the window and just enough above the bottom.

Anyone seen that?

Fastmail user here. Firefox + ABE + EFF Privacy Badger, no problem.

Fastmail's web interface doesn't even have any blockable items once you log in.

Hrmph.

I'm only as far as noticing, uninstalling whichever, going "huh," reinstalling and going "feh."

Do you still have issues if you disable AdBlock on fastmail.com? There shouldn't be any ads on that domain anyway.

Hmm, now I can't reliably reproduce, so I don't know if disabling on fm has any effect. I'll have to wait for it to happen again.

>> Firefox 41 Developer Edition is scheduled to be released in the next day or two.

What about µBlock?

µBlock does not use the same technique of creating a style sheet and inserting it into all loaded documents, so the type of sharing done as part of this work does not help µBlock.

I'm pretty sure it does according to this wikipage[0]. It may not load _all_ the rules into every page, but it definitely does create a stylesheet and inject it into the page.

[0]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Cosmetic-filtering-in...

I can't see where on that page it talks about using style sheets. Last week I searched the µBlock sources for use of the nsIStyleSheetService, which is Gecko's internal interface for adding style sheets without manipulating individual documents, and the only use of that interface is for adding css/legacy-toolbar-button.css, which I assume is for some UI.

So, this might be a case of me assuming too much, but I basically read every instance of _cosmetic filters_ basically as _css styles_. There are a couple CSS files in the git repository that have "filter" in their names[0], but yeah I can't actually be 100% certain at a glance that they're using CSS and not manipulating the DOM with JS.

[0]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/tree/master/src/css

I just did some poking around, and it looks like uBlock does insert a couple of <style> elements into the document. I'm not sure if this is how all style-based blocking is done in uBlock, but since these are document-level style sheets, they are not shared like user agent-level sheets are. (We will in the future be investigating whether we can share more data between common document-level style sheets across multiple documents, though.)

It's good that this is fixed but why is it taking 14 years to fix bugs?

Has anyone compared memory usage when using a hosts file to block ads?

1. Why not start with 1 or 2 decent host files? http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

2. What is bad about ghostery?

1. Hosts blocking is very broad. Good tracking-/ad-blocking is granular.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Criticism

How much did ABP pay Mozilla?

Conspiracy theorist much? Mozilla knows that a significant portion of their userbase uses ad blockers and complains about the high resource usage. They added a cool feature today that would reduce that usage, resulting in a better experience for their users. But you feel someone needed to pay them?

AdBlock Plus is the most popular Firefox extension by a huge margin, so it makes sense to ensure those users get a good experience: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/extensions/?sort=us...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com