Ad Blocking Extensions Tested for Best Performance.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.Its 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.MP306/RAdestroyer/RAdestroyerFr.jpg' alt='10 Years Best I Never Had Download Chrome' title='10 Years Best I Never Had Download Chrome' />Blocking advertisements on web pages is becoming increasingly popular and an ad blocker is now one of the most installed browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox.To. The first couple years after college are a time of huge changes in your life, both personal and professional.Looking back on those years, we can often clearly see.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.Theres 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, weve 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.Ad. Block for Chrome The most popular ad blocker for Chrome with reportedly over 2.There was a Firefox version released briefly but that was pulled from the Firefox add on pages for unknown reasons.Ad. Block has acceptable ad options for You.Tube and Google search but they are off by default.Ad. Block Plus for ChromeAd.Block Plus for Firefox One of the most well known ad blockers and also one of the most controversial because Ad.Block Plus started off the trend of introducing acceptable ad whitelists.The Ad. Block Plus website also has versions for Opera, Safari, Maxthon, Internet Explorer and even Android.Ad. Block Pro for Chrome Ad.Block Pro is based on Ad.Block 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 ChromeAdguard for Firefox Adguard is easy to use and extra blocking scripts can easily be added.Adguards 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.Ad. Remover for Chrome Ad.Remover is based on Ad.Block 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 doesnt ask for donations, there are social media buttons when clicking the icon.Ghostery for ChromeGhostery 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 AdsChrome This hasnt been updated since 2.Simply Block Ads Simple Adblock is the easiest to use and the only option is an opt in to send usage statistics.Super. Block Ad. Blocker for Chrome This is another Ad. more. Block fork and appears to be by the same developer as Ad.Remover. Apart from an extra entry in the filter list and a few styling changes, we cant see much difference between the two, perhaps there are more changes underneath.Adblock for Firefox Adblock Micro Adblock is Easylist and Easy.Privacy based, and almost as easy as it gets.Simply click the icon to blockunblock specific sites.There are only 3 options including blocking social buttons.One issue is Adblock hasnt been updated since January 2.Block Origin for ChromeBlock 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 its 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.Ad. Block Edge Firefox The project has now been discontinued and the author recommends Block Origin instead.Advert. Ban Firefox Hasnt been updated since 2.Ad. Block 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.Ad. Block 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 its adware, at worst its malware and should be avoided at all costs.Below are highlighted ads we received when visiting Amazon.Block Chrome and Firefox This version is essentially a clone of the original Block which was later renamed Block Origin.The author of Block Origin, Raymond Hill, has since disassociated himself from the Block branch and no longer contributes to the project.For these reasons we will test only Block 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 1.Then we looked at 3 different scores Google Chrome Page load time An average taken for the page to load 1.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 blockers process in the Chrome Task Manager ShiftEsc, the maximum amount of Megabytes used during the 1.Peak CPU usage Similar to memory usage, using the Chrome Task Manager the maximum percentage of CPU usage was recorded during the 1.Mozilla Firefox Page load time Average time taken for the page to load 1.Firefox doesnt have a separate load event time in its Network tab like Chrome does, so we used an addon called app.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 dont 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 4.GB, Core Duo 2. 2.Ghz laptop using Wi.Fi 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 4. 4 and Firefox 4.Next well test 1.
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