As part of my project, I like to benchmark regularly privacy enhancing extensions ("blockers") for Chromium-based browsers. So I took the opportunity to run one of my key benchmark this morning. [1]

The results are meant for a github page, but I decided to present them here, and I reformatted specifically to be HN friendly (hopefully).

In short, any of the following blockers help a lot against no blocker at all. Some are less likely to break web pages, while some other are more likely, and every users have their own requirements when it comes to striking balance between privacy and convenience. This is for information purpose only, not to make a statement that one is better than the other. With the proper information, people can make an informed choice according to their own prerogatives.

I ordered the list by the amount of distinct domains which are "touched". I figure the more distinct domains are touched, the more metadata is leaked to different parties. The format of the results is n / N, where n is the number of distinct 3rd-party domains, and N is the total number of distinct domains.

"3rd-party" is from a DB-less machine point of view, i.e. if a domain name differs from the one of the URL of the page, it is deemed 3rd-party. Despite this caveat, I think this still allows to compare blockers between themselves for the same benchmark ran inside the same narrow time frame.

Benefit to the users: It's nice to see privacy becoming more and more a top issue and more and more choice to address this particular problem.

So here:

No blocker

  Domains:            420 / 421
  Hosts:              641 / 720
  Scripts:            518 / 641
  Outbound cookies:   263 / 341
  Net requests:     2,079 / 2,849

Privacy Badger 2014.5.1 (BETA)

  Domains:            192 / 193
  Hosts:              299 / 381
  Scripts:            334 / 455
  Outbound cookies:    52 / 115
  Net requests:     1,340 / 2,176

Disconnect 5.17

  Domains:             93 / 94
  Hosts:              171 / 248
  Scripts:            262 / 385
  Outbound cookies:    19 / 83
  Net requests:     1,124 / 1,936

HTTPSB 0.9 Allow-All/Block-Exceptionally

  Domains:             54 / 55
  Hosts:              101 / 153
  Scripts:            169 / 265
  Outbound cookies:     2 / 43
  Net requests:       930 / 1,648

Adblock Plus 1.7.4

  Domains:             54 / 55
  Hosts:               97 / 149
  Scripts:            177 / 272
  Outbound cookies:     1 / 33
  Net requests:       913 / 1,612

Ghostery 5.2.1

  Domains:             52 / 53
  Hosts:               99 / 160
  Scripts:            173 / 286
  Outbound cookies:     8 / 47
  Net requests:       966 / 1,722

HTTPSB 0.9 Block-All/Allow-Exceptionally

  Domains:             21 / 22
  Hosts:               49 / 75
  Scripts:              0 / 0
  Outbound cookies:     0 / 0
  Net requests:       680 / 1,199

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/wiki/Comparative-...