You can even change it to bind to the external interface and point other machines in your home at it fairly trivially. Ubuntu even uses one by default, where you can add new rules to the default config. There are a number of DNS cachers out there to improve performance. I just type in the name of the company myself instead. The advantage this has over host file is the wildcarding, and of course that it works for all machines on the domain.ĭid this years ago, and haven’t noticed any significant impact, apart from those times I actually try to click on a google ad and google sees fit to send it through doubleclick. I sorted them by domain w/ awk | sort | uniq -c | sort -n then took the offenders w/ the highest cookie counts and did something like: I was shocked at just how many cookies where in the cookie jar. Years ago, I looked at the machine of someone in the family, where, unlike me, there was no cookie whitelisting. In particular, if you hear people complaining about Firefox’s memory usage, one of the first questions to ask is whether they have ABP installed. In the meantime, it’s worth keeping these measurements in mind.
I hope that the ABP authors can work with us to reduce this overhead, though I’m not aware of any clear ideas on how to do so. But if you’re using a low-end machine without much memory, you might have different priorities. Many people (including me!) will be happy with this trade-off - they will gladly use extra memory in order to block ads. So, it’s clear that ABP greatly increases Firefox’s memory usage. Unsurprisingly, the page also loads more slowly with ABP enabled. This is despite the fact that ABP prevents some page elements (ads!) from being loaded.Īn even more extreme example is this page, which contains over 400 iframes. With ABP, that number more than doubles, to 417 MiB. For example, if I load TechCrunch and roll over the social buttons on every story (thus triggering the loading of lots of extra JS code), without ABP, Firefox uses about 194 MiB of physical memory. Many pages have multiple iframes, so this can add up quickly. Second, there’s an overhead of about 4 MiB per iframe, which is mostly due to ABP injecting a giant stylesheet into every iframe. (This is on 64-bit builds on 32-bit builds the number is probably a bit smaller.) This appears to be mostly due to additional JavaScript memory usage, though there’s also some due to extra layout memory. I have happily used it myself for years - whenever I use a browser that doesn’t have an ad blocker installed I’m always horrified by the number of ads there are on the web.īut we recently learned that ABP can greatly increase the amount of memory used by Firefox.įirst, there’s a constant overhead just from enabling ABP of something like 60–70 MiB. AMO says that it has almost 19 million users, which is almost triple the number of the second most popular add-on.
Make sure you haven’t grouped processes by type and then sort the column by CPU usage.AdBlock Plus (ABP) is the most popular add-on for Firefox.
You can always use the Windows task manager to find which tab is consuming a lot of memory or CPU. You can’t sort the tabs by usage so you will have to manually find the tab with high CPU usage. You will see the CPU usage by that tab and you can close it or reload it directly from this page. To see performance stats for an add-on or tab, click ‘more’ next to the tab or add-on. This page will give you a list of all tabs open, and add-ons installed in your browser. Open Firefox and type the following in the address bar. Pick out the tab with high CPU usage and click End Process to close it.įirefox doesn’t have its own task manager like Chrome does but it does have a built-in tool to find performance stats for tabs and add-ons. You will see a list of all tabs you have open, and all extensions you have installed in your browser.
Open a Chrome window and tap the Shift+Esc shortcut to open the task manager. In the unlikely event that Windows isn’t reporting memory or CPU usage correctly, or you don’t see all your tabs you can use the Chrome Task Manager. On Windows, if you open the task manager you will probably see multiple instances of Chrome running.
ChromeĬhrome has its very own task manager. The only trick is to find which tab it is. You can just close the tab with high CPU usage. The good thing about a modern browser is that you don’t have to exit the app. It’s likewise for a tab with high CPU usage. If you leave a browser tab open for too long, it will slowly start using up more and more memory. While these browsers are great at keeping up with technology they have a few problems like memory leaks and high CPU usage. Even if you discount the new features and abilities a modern browser has, you still can’t ignore the fact that they’re much faster. Browsers today have improved exponentially over the past decade.