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Comment by fauigerzigerk | Hacker News Reader

I can't even read this article properly. The site uses 130% CPU, scrolling hardly works at all, it keeps making network requests like crazy and it even crashed my Chrome tab.

And for what reason? I do understand the dilemma that ad funded sites are in. I'm not using an ad blocker. But I simply don't get what purpose this sort of abusive website design is supposed to have.

I will never visit Anandtech again. I've seen it many times. It's never long after advertising gets irrational that content quality suffers as well and the entire site goes down the drain.

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I usually roll my eyes at these complaints, but in this case it's really quite something. I just let the page sit unused for 5min and it downloaded 165MB.

Safari has much better defaults when it comes to such behaviour by ad networks: It blocks 165 requests and shows no further activity after loading 5MB: "Blocked a frame with origin "http://www.anandtech.com" from accessing a frame with origin "http://pixel.mathtag.com". Protocols, domains, and ports must match."

This seems to be caused by a software bug (at least, I'd hope so). The site continues to make requests on a loop, driving up data and resource usage.

You probably need a faster CPU ;-)

No problem with cpu usage here though, but I do have uBlock origin installed. AnandTech can be a nice site to visit every now and then!

Same here. uBlock does the trick.

So what Anandtech managed to do in this case is drive away one reader who doesn't use an ad blocker and attract two users who do.

Where will this end? I believe it will end in all content moving to closed technology platforms that lock out ad blockers, i.e apps.

The reason why I have posted a meta comment, which is always a questionable thing to do, is that there may be people here on Hacker News who can fix this absurd logic that is killing the open web.

I saw the same thing. I had to kill the entire Chrome process. There's something being loaded, probably via ads, that totally wrecks the entire Chrome process group not just the renderer, which is impressive.

It doesn't appear to be caused purely by advertisements. Ghostery reports 70 trackers loaded on the page, and only by "trusting" the website in Ghostery do I see the loading of more data.

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