For example, if I load TechCrunch and roll over the social buttons on every story (thus triggering the loading of lots of extra JS code), without ABP, Firefox uses about 194 MiB of physical memory. Many pages have multiple iframes, so this can add up quickly. Second, there’s an overhead of about 4 MiB per iframe, which is mostly due to ABP injecting a giant stylesheet into every iframe. (This is on 64-bit builds on 32-bit builds the number is probably a bit smaller.) This appears to be mostly due to additional JavaScript memory usage, though there’s also some due to extra layout memory.
I have happily used it myself for years - whenever I use a browser that doesn’t have an ad blocker installed I’m always horrified by the number of ads there are on the web.īut we recently learned that ABP can greatly increase the amount of memory used by Firefox.įirst, there’s a constant overhead just from enabling ABP of something like 60–70 MiB. AMO says that it has almost 19 million users, which is almost triple the number of the second most popular add-on. AdBlock Plus (ABP) is the most popular add-on for Firefox.
