General > General Technical Chat

Why has nobody made a browser which adblocks without the website detecting it?

(1/9) > >>

peter-h:
Sites detect adblocking by checking if some specimen content got rendered. Not sure of the detail but somehow a site can read back what got rendered.

It is obviously possible, by rendering the data to a "hidden" page and then running the normal adblock code on a visible copy.

Yet, no such product AFAIK.

Zero999:

--- Quote from: peter-h on May 06, 2021, 03:04:49 pm ---Sites detect adblocking by checking if some specimen content got rendered. Not sure of the detail but somehow a site can read back what got rendered.

It is obviously possible, by rendering the data to a "hidden" page and then running the normal adblock code on a visible copy.

Yet, no such product AFAIK.

--- End quote ---
No doubt that would use double the memory and would slow it down considerably. One of the advantages of adblock is pages often load more quickly. I suppose if such an adblock did exist it could be configured so the stealth mode only works on sites which block it.

peter-h:
IME, the speed of page loading is nowadays almost totally driven by the ADSL speed together with the server speed.

The latter is usually painfully slow; many sites take several seconds to deliver any sort of complete page.

Browsers running on modern hardware are incredibly fast.

PlainName:
Part of the adblocking is defeating tracking - your browser picking up an ad from a known source is as good a tracking tool as a cookie or one-pixel image. The ad-provider, having a toe in many websites, has almost as good a view of your travels as google analytics.

tooki:

--- Quote from: peter-h on May 06, 2021, 03:31:26 pm ---IME, the speed of page loading is nowadays almost totally driven by the ADSL speed together with the server speed.

The latter is usually painfully slow; many sites take several seconds to deliver any sort of complete page.

Browsers running on modern hardware are incredibly fast.

--- End quote ---
Hah, if only that were true. Transfer rate is almost never the problem, nor server speed. The problem is how all the ad, tracking, and analytics systems work: as a web admin, you integrate a small script onto your page. But then that script runs and in turn loads more scripts, and then those load more… the chain of sequential scripts is what causes the delays. They can’t be preloaded, nor even parallelized, because they’re not known at the time of the initial page load.

And then heaven help if one of the servers hosting those scripts happens to be down or slow.

Nor is it a small difference: on some websites, those delays can make up 90+% of the page load time. Try wired.com for example: with JavaScript disabled or with an ad and tracker blocker, it loads practically instantly. With JavaScript active and no blocker, page load doesn’t usually end before 6-10 seconds.

One study, looking at a set of a million different websites, found that 60% of load times, on average, was due to ads and trackers: https://www.theregister.com/2019/02/15/javascript_delay_analytics/

(Hence why 90+% is well within the bell curve, if 60% is the average.)

When you see stuff load slowly and think it’s a slow web server, it’s almost guaranteed to not be the site’s web server, but the shitty ad and tracking network.

Additionally, many sites now use heavy client-side frameworks that demand insane amounts of local processing power, as they’ve essentially built giant, generic app frameworks within which they build the site. Not only are those frameworks often megabytes of scripts that need to download, but they need tons of CPU. Facebook is a perfect example of this. It’s so processing-heavy now that it’s nearly unusable on older systems. (Systems which have no trouble at all with more sanely written pages.)

Last but not least, there are even ads that max out your CPU (killing your battery life, making your system run hot, and negatively impacting actual system performance) to do… wait for it… Bitcoin mining at your expense.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page