"Adblock Plus" has greatly increased the memory consumption of Firefox

ByPascale Pirate Chickan

Automatically hide advertisements on the web "Adblock Plus"Is the most popular add-on installed in the Firefox add-on. Although deleting ads has the effect of speeding up page loading and eliminating unnecessary elements on the page, browsing will be comfortable, while Adblock Plus significantly increases Firefox's memory consumption It became clear that there was.

AdBlock Plus's effect on Firefox's memory usage | Nicholas Nethercote
https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-pluss-effect-on-firefoxs-memory-usage/


Firefox's "Most Popular Extensions"Looking at the page of Adblock Plus, the number of users is over 19 million. Since the number of users of the second most popular add-on is about 6.3 million people, it can be seen that there are more than twice as many openings. Programmers who love Adblock Plus for several yearsNicholas NethercoteThinks that you will see innumerable advertisements when you have to use a different browser, and told you to shudder.


Such Nethercote noticed that Adblock Plus significantly increased the memory consumption of Firefox. If you are using Windows 7 (64-bit version), when you activate Adblock Plus the memory consumption will constantly be 60 to 70MiBIt increased by about. This increment was mainly applied for JavaScript.


Also, as we continue to investigate,Inline frame (iFrame)Is used, it turns out that memory consumption increases by about 4 MiB for each frame. Nethercote says that if you think that iframe is used on various pages and Adblock Plus is moving for blocking its loading, you will be satisfied with the result that memory consumption is increasing.


As a concrete example, Nethercote cited access to TechCrunch. In TechCrunch, buttons for sharing by SNS are embedded in each article, and placing the cursor on the button loads a lot of JavaScript code to display each sharing number. In Firefox with Adblock Plus disabled, while using 194 MiB of physical memory, when you activate Adblock Plus, Adblock Plus is blocking ad loading, but memory consumption The amount was found to increase more than twice as 417MiB.


Nethercote lists the site for VIM color checking as a sample how much memory consumption will increase. This page uses over 400 iFrames, and when you browse with Firefox with Adblock Plus disabled, the memory consumption is about 370 MiB, but if Adblock Plus is enabled, it jumps to 1960 MiB. Therefore, the reversal phenomenon that the page loading becomes late occurs when the Adblock Plus is enabled.

VIM Color Scheme Test - C - Sat Sep 26 16: 32: 23 2009
[Since iFrame is massive, watching browsing]http://vimcolorschemetest.googlecode.com/svn/html/index-c.html


It is a fact as mentioned above that memory consumption increases when Adblock Plus is enabled. However, "Many people, including me, would be satisfied if the exchange condition to hide the advertisement was enough to increase memory consumption.If you are able to block ads, I am willing to give extra memory" Nethercote says. Meanwhile, some users may not have enough memory by using low-priced PCs, so we continued that the author of Adblock Plus wishes to take some countermeasures.