Hacker News Reader

The browsing experience is dramatically faster with uBlock. The thousands of regexps don't come close to the CPU or memory load of ads.

A 386 could handle a regexp fine. Compare that to audio or video decoding for ads. Not the same ballpark by orders of magnitude.

It's dead because Google makes money from ads. I shifted to Firefox ages ago.

View on HN

I traced the CPU usage on my wife's laptop many years ago. That wasn't a fast machine, but it wasn't a 386 either. The ad blockers were her performance problems, alone.

If the browser maintainers have seen a couple of machines with similar problems and maintainers of regexp-using add blockers simply insisted that their code was fast, "a 386 could handle" etc, I can easily see how the browser maintainers might lose patience. Don't need to assume ill will.

My comment wasn't that every ad blocker was performant. My comment was about uBlock specifically.

My comment wasn't that all algorithms are always efficient. It was that properly compiled regular expressions are.

Extensions often lead to performance issues.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com