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Comment by MicroBerto | Hacker News Reader

People aren't using Adblock to conserve resources. They're using it to block ads and most are willing to take a performance hit to do so.

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That's not why I started using Adblock. I started because the web became unusable on an older machine (5 years). The content wasn't any more sophisticated but it soaked up all the resources (CPU, RAM etc.) available. Imagine if you had a PDF reader that ran at 100% CPU and swapped all the time!

Indeed, the post you replied to is not based in actual reality. The entire foundation of the adblock industry was an aggressive attention-war plied by the ad business, where soon webpages were an armed conflict of aggressive ads each imposing even more of a tax.

No one expected the cure to be worse than the disease. I couldn't believe it somewhat recently when I had to use an older laptop to find that simply running Chrome was completely untenable if ABP was installed.

I have an atom dual core small PC connected to my TV (it runs windows 7, yeah I know) and it's 'ok-ish' with performance, but starting a browser is a tad slow (chrome) and adblock makes it even slower as it's a plugin which is particularly slow to start. So I don't think blocking ads for performance reasons on slow machines is still cutting it if you take into account the performance penalty of abp.

All things considered however, it's IMHO a small price to pay for having the freedom to decide which content is fetched during page rendering and thus which services won't know whether you're visiting a certain webpage.

>Imagine if you had a PDF reader that ran at 100% CPU and swapped all the time!

So...Acrobat Reader?

In general, anyone who is on Hacker Newa is not who I'm referring to when I say "people". 99% care about not seeing ads.

I so agree! I have been annoyed at Firefox's resource hunger for a couple of years, now, and I have been aware of ABP being a major factor in that, too, but all in all, I think it is still worth it.

It is a sad reflection on the state of advertisement, but lacking any viable alternatives, using an adblocker (and NoScript) is pretty much non-negotiable to me. I am always apalled when I have to use a browser without an ad blocker installed.

It is not that I mind the ads in general, but too often, they are seriously distracting, and advertisers seem happy to go totally overboard. Imagine walking down the street and looking at blinking, flashing billboards. Imagine turning on your car and being greeted by an ad before the engine actually gets going. If ads outside the Internet were as annoying as they are online, we probably would have riots. (And that is ignoring the malware.)

i've found just ghostery with the ad blocking lists is just as good at blocking ads, while being faster.

Firefox is actually much less resource-hungry than Chrome, though that's largely because it doesn't (yet) use different processes for different tabs....

Actually, you can turn that on now to check it out: http://www.jkwebtalks.com/2014/02/enable-multi-process-tabs-...

No, that uses a single process for all tabs.

? No, the multi-process tab feature is all about one process per tab.

Maybe someday. Not today. You get one tab process that crashes often.

And I wouldn't say that's the 'point'. Chrome groups tabs into fewer processes most of the time.

Personally I'm much more excited about the possibility of a compacting GC.

You get one process that crashes about as often as Chrome, though it consumes fewer resources and is much faster to restart (by not loading tabs unless you go to them).

The increasing crashiness of Chrome was one of the reasons I stopped using it.

You're a lot luckier than I am.

Also it still takes a nontrivial amount of time to not-load a lot of tabs.

Not-loading tabs is a heck of a lot quicker than loading them (and I usually have more than 500 in Firefox). Otherwise, I'm not the only person who has had too many problems with Chrome: https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm...

The idea that you have to choose between a blocker or resources has become common unfortunately.

It's unfortunate because this idea being held as a premise by so many users kind of give a free pass to developers to not work harder to improve their code.

I'm using adblock type stuff to conserve resources. After finding out about the memory use my safari process size went from 6g to about 3.5g (i'm a heavy user of tabs). So yeah it comes in handy for resource conservation.

Sure using a blocker there's some expectation of resources used but in the case of Adblock it's ridiculously high and has really bad response to the number of iframes on a page.

Resource conservation is one of the primary justifications that people cite for why they block ads: many ads have high level of animation, auto-play videos, and so on, that it lags down the experience, especially when a single page has a number of them competing for your attention.

I would be surprised if many would agree with accepting a performance hit for what ostensibly is your browser doing much less.

This is just not true (your first claim that is, I would say people use it for multiple reasons). Adblock can certainly conserve resources in some cases. I know one webpage that loads 2-3 very resource-intensive banner ads every 30 seconds or so. I've seen websites that do a lot worse too.

I would just like to say I have never been a major user of Adblock. There are two reasons I have always been okay without it:

1. I feel somewhat bad about using a free service and preventing them from getting ad revenue

2. I'm really good at ignoring advertising of all kinds. People might say it still works subliminally or it has an effect on me and I just don't notice it, but I seriously don't believe this is true. With TV I used to mute it, change the channel, or do something else on my computer (I don't watch TV anymore, but I do admit I pay attention to ads if I join somebody else that watches it). With video ads on the internet I mute the audio and do something else on my computer. I basically have never intentionally clicked a banner ad, besides maybe some Facebook ads only because they seem to have access to my Amazon search history and show me items I'm already shopping for. Facebook is certainly a different beast in terms of advertising because it involves showing businesses that friends have liked, but I wouldn't say this has a very positive effect on my opinion about that business.

That said, I used Adblock many years ago around when it first came out to block YouTube ads but switched over to my muting/ignoring method because it did affect my conscience negatively, not so much because of YouTube/Google but because of other content I browsed on the web.

My setup recently has been to have Adblock installed on Firefox (I have always primarily used Chrome) for the instances where ads on a website are causing performance/experience issues. I have had Adblock installed (disabled) on Chrome because I have a Chromebook and have occasionally enabled it in order to visit the problem website on it (it is pretty much unusable on this Atom processor without Adblock). In the past several months I have noticed some very weird bad performance issues if I leave it enabled and use YouTube (maybe some other websites), not sure if this is due to changes in Adblock or if YouTube is intentionally breaking itself when it detects Adblock usage.

P.S. I'm not sure if any of this has anything to do with my previous post being downvoted, but I felt compelled to explain my reasons for using Adblock.

P.P.S. The website I am primarily talking about that has become nearly unusable and quite unstable due to ads is tinychat.com... My reasons for being okay with blocking them for this website are complicated and I'd rather not go into detail.

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