Best of Adblocking extensions

Lenny_Fox

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@Rezjor,

I recently changed from Windows Phone to Samsung A70 and I had seen it listed at the adblockers. Because I can't recall anyone mentioning it over here, I (wrongly) thought it was just another ABP or uBO rip-off.

AdbockFast said:
Just as webpages grew bloated with ads, so too have ad blockers grown bloated with little-used filtering rules and features that sap their speed and hog your computer’s disk space, CPU cycles, and memory. Adblock Fast runs a mere 7 optimized filtering rules to accelerate pages 8x more but consume 6x less system resources than other ad blockers do.

I have installed to give it a go, okay skip that have uninstalled it again, see below (their privacy policy)
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1573156746749.png
 
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Lenny_Fox

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I was intrigued by Adblockfast, I could not get my head around on how the developer managed with only 7 rules which were derived from EasyList and Bluhell, so this morning in the train to school I had a look at AdBlockfast on Github.

The bold statement:
AdblockFast said:
Just as webpages grew bloated with ads, so too have ad blockers grown bloated with little-used filtering rules and features that sap their speed and hog your computer or device’s disk space, CPU cycles, and memory. Adblock Fast executes a mere 7 optimized filtering rules to accelerate pages 8x more but consume 6x less system resources than other ad blockers do.

Reading that I assumed that AdblockFast used some form of behavioral or heuristics mechanism, but then I read that the (only 7) rules were based on Easylist and Bluhelll
Adblockfast said:
Where does Adblock Fast’s filtering ruleset come from?
Adblock Fast’s ruleset is derived from EasyList and that of Bluhell Firewall.

That seemed weird to me, how could you fit in a 50.000+ ruleset into just 7 rules? I found the answer on Github. In one of the files the 7-rules blocklist was included and after looking at it, it turnout the be a gigantic piped and concatenated 7 line blocklist based on regular expressions. The regex looks at fragments of the webpages loaded and when the string matches any of the regex values it blocks it. Normally regex is a bit slower than ABP-rules so the developer pulled some tricks to make it run faster than AdblockPlus.

To the developer's credit he really looked upon adblocking from an interesting angle and pulled some remarkeable tricks to make it work, but when you copy the 7-rules Adblockfast into a word document, you end up with a 53 page document with a little less than 20.000 regex. So the 7-line rule file contains 19.076 regex rules, clever (y)

In the picture below the | is replaced by X, so MsWord would tell me how much pipes (or's) were used in the 7 line rules file.

1573203983217.png
 
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Azure

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So, I tried to use Page Load Timer to determine if there was a difference between Adblock Fast and my tweaked (non-default) uBlock Origin.

For me, it didn't seem that much of a difference. Though uBlock loaded pages faster most likely because of the script blocking.

I want to know if anyone here can see a difference between their preferred adblocker and adblock fast.

Here's a link to the extension I used.
 

Azure

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@Azure how long it takes you to load MT main page from google search?
Opening my browser and going directly to MalwareTips, it gave me 9.82.

The time is most likely due some extensions I'm using. But I don't mind that much since for some reason only MalwareTips seems to be affected drastically out of the sites I frequent.

Without extensions, I got 4.34.
 
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Lenny_Fox

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Re: AdBlockFast, please NOTICE their privacy policy, I uninstalled it after reading it, only reason to look a bit further into it is because I was intrigued by the claims and wondered how the developer could do this.

Page load time on Lenovo Thinkpad with Intel Celeron P4600 (yes 10 years old) on my Windows 10 parition using Edge Chromium is a bit faster than Firefox on my Linux Manjaro partition.

Edge chromium using Microsoft's tracking prevention on balanced with Ghoster extension (and bruce blank tab)
a) from Google search: 8.94
b) directly in address bar: 4.68

I have set Edge-chromium to delete all after closing the browser, so nothing should be cached. Differentces should be related to DNS (1.1.1.1) I am using. I will try reversed order (after reboot come back with those results).

a) directly in address bar: 4.31
b) from Google search: 4.02

So the first delay probably was in the DNS

P.S.
We have 100 Mbit Ziggo download, 10Mb upload, on average through Wifi (one floor away from router) getting 50-60 Mb download.

Loadtimes on Linux Manjaro with Firefox (using Firefox anti-tracking custom - block third-party I have not visited is simular to Microsoft tracking protection) and Privacy Badger"

a) from Google search: 5.13
b) directly in address bar: 4..82

This was tested after first Windows 10 test (also reason why I figured out first slow result was in DNS).
 
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Freki123

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Re: Adguardfast, please NOTICE their privacy policy, I uninstalled it after reading it, only reason to look a bit further into it is because I was intrigued by the claims and wondered how the developer could do this.
Did you mean adblock fast? Was curious if Adguard developed a new product and tried to find it :)
 
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TairikuOkami

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I want to know if anyone here can see a difference between their preferred adblocker and adblock fast.
Literally none. Then again, there are no baddies on this site. I cleared the cache after each visit and these are the results:

MT: adblock fast - 4.03 / no adblocking - 4.01 / adguard with anti-tracking only - 4.17 / adguard with adblocking - 4.03
CNET: adblock fast - 2.91 / no adblocking - 3.99 / adguard with anti-tracking only - 1.84 / adguard with adblocking - 1.90
P.S. I do not block ads, because all those rules and filtering can cause a slowdown, I block only the tracking, the main cause of it.
 

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ForgottenSeer 823865

Opening my browser and going directly to MalwareTips, it gave me 9.82.

The time is most likely due some extensions I'm using. But I don't mind that much since for some reason only MalwareTips seems to be affected drastically out of the sites I frequent.

Without extensions, I got 4.34.
From google search: around 8.2sec.
Directly from browser: around 5.6sec.
Refreshing the page: 1.6sec.

Loaded via VPN with Adguard for Desktop, Malwarebytes and Netcraft extension.
yes for some reason MT is slow to load.
 

Lenny_Fox

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From google search: around 8.2sec.
Directly from browser: around 5.6sec.
Refreshing the page: 1.6sec.

Loaded via VPN with Adguard for Desktop, Malwarebytes and Netcraft extension.
yes for some reason MT is slow to load.

It surprises me that the page loading is slower when you compare your hardware with mine. Care for a little test or experiment?
malwaretips.com is on cloudflare, so could you change your DNS provider to 1.1.1.1 (partnership of Cloudflare and APNIC) and test load times again?
  • IPv4: 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1
  • IPv6: 2606:4700:4700::1111 and 2606:4700:4700::1001
 
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LDogg

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I just stick to Scriptsafe + NanoAdblocker (with other filterlists) does the job. I try not to go overboard with this as I find it for home users to be a complete waste of time. However for a forum such as MWT this is about as ideal as having gold, this thread is a great resource!

Thanks for sharing you expertise & knowledge with us.

~LDogg
 
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ForgottenSeer 823865

It surprises me that the page loading is slower when you compare your hardware with mine. Care for a little test or experiment?
malwaretips.com is on cloudflare, so could you change your DNS provider to 1.1.1.1 (partnership of Cloudflare and APNIC) and test load times again?
  • IPv4: 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1
  • IPv6: 2606:4700:4700::1111 and 2606:4700:4700::1001
i use my VPN's DNS and DoH on Chrome. so maybe a reason. also my internet speed may not be as fast as yours.
 

Azure

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From google search: around 8.2sec.
Directly from browser: around 5.6sec.
Refreshing the page: 1.6sec.

Loaded via VPN with Adguard for Desktop, Malwarebytes and Netcraft extension.
yes for some reason MT is slow to load.
I initially thought that my time was due to my extensions but after disabling them that doesn't seem to be the case.

Can you guys see if there's a difference in loading between being logged in and not?
 
F

ForgottenSeer 823865

Can you guys see if there's a difference in loading between being logged in and not?
not logged in from google: 3.2sec. then logging in took an additional 9sec
so it is clear that MT loads lot of stuff when you log in.

DoH is working with your VPN? Last time i checked it didnt work on mine
didn't check, i just enabled it in Chrome because sometimes i run it without VPNs activated.
 

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