Blocking website adverts in web browsers has been a hot topic in
recent years and there are merits to both sides of the argument. Many
sites out there bombard you with tons of ads, and quite often you will
feel that you have no choice but to use an ad blocker because either the
ads slow down the site loading too much, or they are incredibly annoying and get in the way or distract from your browsing.
On the other side, there are sites that try to inconvenience you as
little as possible and be sensible with the amount of ads displayed and
their placement. Blanket use of ad blockers will hurt those sites just
as much as the bad sites you feel have gone overboard with their ads.
It’s no secret the vast majority of websites on the internet need to use
ads to help pay for running costs. Staff, hardware, fast servers, fast
CDNs and the like are not free and need to be paid for.
But we cannot get away from the fact an ad blocker is probably the number one add-on for browsers like Chrome and Firefox,
and will continue to be so for some time yet. Besides removing the
adverts, ad blockers also save bandwidth by cutting down the amount of
content a page loads, they can also help with your privacy by blocking
scripts that track your browsing habits.
There’s several ad blocking extensions available for Chrome and Firefox,
and some work better than others. To see what they do when when loading
a web page, we’ve decided to put a number of ad blockers to the
test. This test is about the performance of an ad blocker in terms of
how quickly it loads a range of ad blocked pages, the maximum amount of
memory it uses and how much stress it puts on the CPU.
The Ad Blockers on Test
There are many more ad blockers available in Chrome than in Firefox
which is the reverse of what we expected. Here are the ones we are
testing for both browsers.
AdBlock for Chrome
– The most popular ad blocker for Chrome with reportedly over 200
million downloads. There was a Firefox version released briefly but that
was pulled from the Firefox add on pages for unknown reasons. AdBlock
has acceptable ad options for YouTube and Google search but they are off
by default.
AdBlock Plus for Chrome /AdBlock Plus for Firefox –
One of the most well known ad blockers and also one of the most
controversial because AdBlock Plus started off the trend of introducing
acceptable ad whitelists. The AdBlock Plus website also has versions for
Opera, Safari, Maxthon, Internet Explorer and even Android.
AdBlock Pro for Chrome
– AdBlock Pro is based on AdBlock Plus but has a simpler options
interface and no acceptable ads option. The icon button sits in the
address bar instead of the normal add on area and has 3 simple options
to disable, go to options or create a filter.
Adguard for Chrome /Adguard for Firefox
– Adguard is easy to use and extra blocking scripts can easily be
added. Adguard’s main product is a shareware desktop application that
blocks ads in a number of browsers without the need for browser add-ons.
Beta versions of both add-ons are available for testers.
AdRemover for Chrome
– AdRemover is based on AdBlock with just about the same number of
options minus the support tab. On the face of it, most of the
differences appear to be cosmetic and although it doesn’t ask for
donations, there are social media buttons when clicking the icon.
Ghostery for Chrome /Ghostery for Firefox
– Ghostery can block analytic scripts, widgets, web beacons, privacy
scripts and or course advertisements. The good thing about Ghostery is
the ability to individually enable or disable scripts on a per site
basis. Versions are available for Opera, IE, Safari and mobile operating
systems.
Simply Block Ads! for Chrome
– This hasn’t been updated since 2014 and there’s reports that some ads
aren’t being blocked, but it blocked all ads on our test sites so we
included it. Simply Block Ads! (aka Simple Adblock) is the easiest to
use and the only option is an opt-in to send usage statistics.
SuperBlock AdBlocker for Chrome
– This is another AdBlock fork and appears to be by the same developer
as AdRemover. Apart from an extra entry in the filter list and a few
styling changes, we can’t see much difference between the two, perhaps
there are more changes underneath.
µ Adblock for Firefox
– µ Adblock (Micro Adblock) is Easylist and EasyPrivacy based, and
almost as easy as it gets. Simply click the icon to block/unblock
specific sites. There are only 3 options including blocking social
buttons. One issue is µ Adblock hasn’t been updated since January 2015.
µBlock Origin for Chrome /µBlock Origin for Firefox
– An up and coming ad and script blocker for both Chrome and Firefox,
it also claims to be very CPU and memory efficient. A lot but not too
many scripts are blocked out of the box and it’s easy to use with a
number of other blocklists readily available. You can also allow or
block specific sites from loading on the page via advanced mode.
Ad Blockers not tested
AdBlock Edge (Firefox) – The project has now been discontinued and the author recommends µBlock Origin instead.
AdvertBan (Firefox) – Hasn’t been updated since 2012 and inevitably leaves most or all ads untouched.
AdBlock Lite (Chrome and Firefox) – Left a number of
ads untouched on our test sites, even in the more aggressive Full mode.
Various sources say the project has all but been abandoned.
AdBlock Super (Chrome) – After reading reviews and
doing some testing we found that this addon actually injects ads of its
own from a number of third parties. At best it’s adware, at worst it’s
malware and should be avoided at all costs. Below are highlighted ads we
received when visiting Amazon.com.
µBlock (Chrome and Firefox) – This version is
essentially a clone of the original µBlock which was later renamed
µBlock Origin. The author of µBlock Origin, Raymond Hill, has since
disassociated himself from the µBlock branch and no longer contributes
to the project. For these reasons we will test only µBlock Origin.
How We Tested the Ad Blockers
Testing websites can be tricky because ads are served by third
parties so a page is depending on external servers during loading. To
try and even out any inconsistencies and also any differences with other
servers being used by the website, each webpage tested was refreshed 10
times in succession and any times considered abnormal were discarded
and the page refreshed again. Then we looked at 3 different scores:
Google Chrome:
Page load time – An average taken for the page to
load 10 times. We are using the Load event to time when the browser has
finished retrieving all the resources required by the page. In Chrome
this is a red score on the Network tab in Developer Tools. Caching is
disabled so resources are refreshed each time.
Peak memory usage – We watched the memory usage of
the ad blocker’s process in the Chrome Task Manager (Shift+Esc), the
maximum amount of Megabytes used during the 10 page loads was recorded.
Peak CPU usage – Similar to memory usage, using the
Chrome Task Manager the maximum percentage of CPU usage was recorded
during the 10 page loads.
Mozilla Firefox:
Page load time – Average time taken for the page to
load 10 times. Firefox doesn’t have a separate load event time in its
Network tab like Chrome does, so we used an addon called app.telemetry Page Speed Monitor to get the times.
The frustrating thing about Firefox is you cannot get accurate scores
for memory or CPU usage of extensions during use because unlike Chrome,
everything is loaded into a single process. The about:memory page and a
few related add ons don’t give a true live score for memory usage. As a
result we could only record results for page load times in Firefox.
Tests were conducted on a 4GB, Core Duo 2.2Ghz laptop using WiFi and
running Windows 7 as the operating system. Although the tests could have
been run on a more powerful system, we believe the laptop will produce
more representative scores for the average computer.
All ad blockers were installed and used with their default settings,
nothing else was changed. The only exception is Ghostery which runs a
wizard on startup where you need to choose what to block, for that we
selected only the Advertising blocking option. Chrome 44 and Firefox 40
were the browsers used for testing.
Read More: HERE
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