The methodology is questionable on several fronts:<p>- you can't use the load event to compare advert-heavy vs. advert-free load times. The load event does <i>not</i> fire when the page is usable by the viewer, it fires when every last request is done, in particular even requests fired from various advert iframes. However, those requests may not impact page usability. The load event may even never fire - any offscreen 1px spacer gif that times out will cause that! I don't think there is a built-in event for "done-enough", but the load event is certainly misleading.<p>- opening the developer tools causes various side-effects; those can cause the page to load more slowly than usual. You shouldn't benchmark with developer tools open (unless you're explicitly targeting usage with devtools open...)<p>- comparing load times across browsers as reported by the browsers themselves <i>may</i> be valid, but it's not obvious. You definitely want to check that carefully.<p>- Measuring "peak" CPU usage is almost meaningless without considering how long the CPU is used.<p>- Measuring the chrome extension process CPU usage and memory usage isn't very helpful, because running this kind of extension causes CPU usage and memory usage in every content tab. Both of these statistics for chrome in this use-case are meaningless. You'd need to measure the memory usage and CPU-time of the entire chrome process tree to get meaningful results. Even in Firefox without e10s it's not valid to measure just the main process CPU and memory usage because plugins are in separate processes (and things like flash or h264 decoding can definitely use CPU and memory).<p>The only thing this page really makes a decent case for is that Chrome loads pages faster than Firefox - but even there, it's not clear we're dealing with an apples-to-apples comparison.
They didn't seem to know about e10s in Firefox Nightly which would have solved their "no separate process" thing.<p>Measuring peak CPU is very, very stupid. The best Ad Blocker should have near 100% CPU but for an extremely short amount of time. Using 100% CPU is making the most efficient use of the hardware, not being inefficient. Now, I think due to the way they're measuring, it's actually closer to being average CPU because task manager samples over a period.<p>Also: "Firefox didn’t like this page at all and we couldn’t get consistent readings to run tests, on every refresh the browser would simply not respond or crash."<p>Huh? I think somethings wrong there. Firefox obviously renders tmz.com. A bug in the thing they used to monitor page load times? Did they check the performance impact of it?
So it looks like about 1/4 of the time spent loading a page these days is spent on the page and the remaining 3/4 are waiting for ad networks. There's got to be an opportunity there.<p>I previously worked at a digital agency and one of my final projects was building the website for a large TV channel. At one point I had to have a meeting with the ad network to go through the integration.<p>The technical people involved didn't know anything about how their products worked or the implications of integrating them. No idea if they were blocking or async.<p>At one point I was trying to understand what, if any, changes I might need to make to handle their ads that did full background take overs. "No no no, it's an <i>expanding mpu</i>" - sure, fine, what does that even mean!?<p>(Don't get me started on having to swap using js for switching images in the gallery for using individual pages because the onmiture page tracking numbers were the metric that everything was measured by for selling ad space)<p>/rant<p>You'd think with all the smart people that have put their minds to ads on the internet, there would be lightning fast, targeted ads that actually worked by now.
Sure it's a nice test, and gives a keen idea of how much performance you can grab by using uBlock Origin.<p>However, what about pages _without_ ads? Am I going to experience a significant performance hit when running an adblocker on genuine websites?
This is important. Because, assuming the advertising industry is going to self-destruct tomorrow morning, am I going to experience a slower web if I let my add-on activated, and thus letting an opportunity for the ads to reappear later?
Would be interesting to have tested using a hosts file (like from <a href="http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/" rel="nofollow">http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/</a> ) instead of an ad blocker. Seems to work very well for me, and it doesn't cause the browser to use loads of RAM.
In reality, people want a page that becomes <i>usable</i> as quickly as possible. Specifically, people use hovers and scrolling to test that a given page is 'ready.'<p>That is very different from a page that fires DOMContentLoaded as quickly as possible. That metric is pretty much irrelevant to real people.<p>Which is part of why ads aren't quite as nasty as a lot of tech industry people make out.
I would have really liked to have seen an ad-reduced hosts file compared to these in-browser blockers.<p><a href="http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt" rel="nofollow">http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt</a>
At the end of last year, I spent a while working with an adtech firm, helping them figure out their product strategy. They all use Ghostery and I started using it too. Subjectively, my web-browsing experience improved massively, particularly page load times. It's nice to see that experience borne out by objective testing.<p>I often think that companies like Ghostery are missing a trick by not advertising themselves as a method of speeding up your internet connection because that's really what it does.
Lowest overhead: Disable JS (add it to a hotkey) and use DNS level filtering: <a href="https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsmasq-blacklist" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsmasq-blacklist</a><p>With surf+tabbed, each tab is it's own process, so you can enable and disable JS and or plugins per page.
Next we need to find the best blocker cocktail. I use uBlock Origin, Ghostery and Flashcontrol on Chrome. Bit over the top possibly - can take a bit of trial an error to see what's blocking the thing if something you want doesn't load.
Why is uBlock somewhat frowned upon here on HN? From what I've seen published it's still a good solution - works well for me. I thought the original developer gave up the project and was being rather difficult about the whole thing.
Forgetting the accuracy of the OP, I cannot be the only one who doesn't care in the least that adblockers slow load times. Between my ISP's shoddy service, the popups and distracting animations adblockers stop, the net effect is a faster overall experience. A few seconds on page load is a fair price to pay for the increased privacy and security.
One of my pet projects is 'wijVrij', a cheap TP-Link router with OpenWRT and a bootup-script which installs the winhelp2002 hosts file.<p>Works wonders on all your devices. <a href="https://wijvrij.nl" rel="nofollow">https://wijvrij.nl</a> ( dutch )