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Comment by insin | Hacker News Reader

> We keep things like Adblock Plus at arm's length for plausible deniability - but everyone I know uses it.

I wish this had been included in the main body of this post, with some metrics; everyone you know uses it because it makes the web suck so much less.

Loading The Verge's article in a Chrome incognito window: 19.6 MB transferred, finished in 41.9 s, huge ad covering the entire page above the developer console I had open to watch things load.

Same article in a new incognito window with Adblock Plus enabled: 1.5 MB transferred, finished in 16.94s.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/jbscript/status/624535428620791808

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Default-deny is the best answer against bloat -- though not for everybody unfortunately, but I did try to make it as straightforward as possible with uBlock Origin[1]. Using default-deny in uBlock Origin/Chromium[2] and with the page displaying properly, I get from Network pane in dev console:

- 62 requests

- 508 KB transferred

Once you start using default-deny mode, it's difficult to go back to anything less restrictive as one get quickly used to how fast pages load -- and with such virtuous "side-effects" as foiling most 3rd-party tracking/data mining by default. Once usual sites are "unbroken" and ruleset saved, using default-deny become less and less of a annoyance over time. For example, I already had the only two rules necessary to unbreak The Verge so the page appeared correctly the first visit.

Another example of ridiculous amount of bloat: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Tips-and-tricks-water...

* * *

[1] sorry if this sounds like a plug, I do feel strongly about users re-claiming control about where their computer connects.

[2] using suggested default-deny ruleset at https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-de...

> sorry if this sounds like a plug, I do feel strongly about users re-claiming control about where their computer connects.

Would you install an extension that, when clicking a link to the verge, it pops up a message that says "this site is considered by the community to be a site that employs intrusive advertising techniques" to remind you not to connect to it at all?

Totally. The web isn't going to change until there are hard consequences for those that are screwing it up, and without information such as this most users won't realize what is happening and bad websites continue to get away with it (and all the ill-gotten revenue).

Web of Trust does something similar, but seems to be geared more towards spam and malware. Would be nice to have something to keep track of all the sites that I forget not to go to (e.g. Forbes).

I have been using NoScript for years and I selectively whitelist enough domains until the site loads properly. Typically the actual domain, perhaps a web server & CDN. The raft of ancillary domains I just leave blocked.

Working at a major e-commerce company, I get I why they're there. Like many others, I've found the web much more... responsive... without the huge page loads, and I don't like the idea of how far my data travels around and is shared, corss-referenced, etc.

Great post.

Raymond, how did Chris get to take over the original branch, and yours appears as a derivative work, when you are the originator? What the hell happened?

I want to switch to uBlock Origin, but I currently use Safari. It uses the least amount of resources on my Mac compared to Chrome and Firefox.

He transfered the repo then made a fork.

The difference in page load times before and after implementing uBlock is staggering. Having to use a computer you don't own (or mobile) feels like traveling back to 1999 using 56k dial-up.

What's worse is that there are still plenty of places that haven't actually progressed beyond 1999 using 56k dial-up. A lot of these multi-megabyte JavaScript-laden sites are basically a big "fuck you" to those in developing countries and even rural/underdeveloped portions of developed countries that don't even have so much as DSL, let alone cable broadband or fiber. For them, it's either 56k dialup or paying absurd amounts of money (in a multi-year contract, no less) for a satellite connection (which tends to have significant performance problems due to the higher latency).

Thankfully, this is starting to become less of a problem as cellular networks continue to expand, but there are still quite a few places where cell coverage is spotty at best (including here, in the Sierra Nevada mountains, where the mountains themselves cast all sorts of coverage shadows no matter how many towers get put up).

Firefox mobile supports extensions like ublock just fine. Use a browser which doesn't suck :)

And if you're using an Iphone: you made the choice that apple should make all the choices for you. You've made your own bed. Sorry about that.

They already made that choice for iOS9.

I guess that can be reduced a lot if not only adverts, but all the tracking scripts are blocked.

I just tested this with uMatrix where I use pretty much the defaults, but allow the two CDNs for theverge.com.

Ended up with 600kB downloaded and 1.37s load time on an empty cache.

I've replaced Adblock with uBlock and uMatrix and couldn't be happier. It seems to have a smaller footprint in the browser and better results at filtering away unwanted requests.

The only thing that would make this perfect is if they would also run on my Android phone.

uBlock Origin at least runs in Firefox on Android; I rarely use Chrome on it so can't speak to that.

i uninstalled chrome and facebook, replaced with ff and tinfoil. much better battery life. only google apps i have is play music, google and translate (im rooted)

I see a pattern. I may be revealing a bit too much about my longevity, but I've always hated two thing about 'reading' a magazine: the little subscription tear-offs that fall out littering every floor, and that you can't actually read and article without experiencing some form of ADD by flipping through pages of ads you don't care about to get to the next paragraph.

Sound familiar? I just described most web sites by recalling reading a 20th century vintage print magazine. That should sadden everyone. We have a triumph of human progress in not just the Internet, but the Web that rides above it. The promise is a more intelligent and enlightened interaction between content provider and content receiver, perhaps more like a conversation than the print-radio-TV one-way street. Instead, it's not really much different at all, except with more ads and popups.

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