from Hacker News

Show HN: A website speed test tool to compare uBlock Origin with plain Chrome

by aberforth123 on 9/23/19, 8:02 PM with 57 comments

• by guessmyname on 9/23/19, 11:44 PM

  YouTube sends more requests with uBlock Origin enabled? [1][2]

  My theory is, without the ads, there is more space in the webview to load video thumbnails, each item representing a video in the HTML document probably requires a handful of HTTP requests to load and pre-fetch their corresponding metadata. I would not be surprised if other websites react in the same way. I hope this is the case, but I am suspicious enough that I will investigate further how the ad-blocker affects these websites.

  [1] https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.youtube.com

  [2] https://i.imgur.com/HBB4TkK.png

• by stevekemp on 9/24/19, 6:17 AM

  You need to filter the URLs that are accepted to avoid security problems - had you a contact address on your profile here, or on the site I'd have disclosed this more privately.

  But consider this case:

  https://webtest.app/?url=file:///etc/passwd

  In short you should restrict URLs to protocols of `http`, `https`, and even then you should filter based on IP. You don't want people to view http://localhost/server-status, etc.

  Finally you need to make sure you avoid recursion:

  https://webtest.app/?url=https://webtest.app/?url=https://st...

• by nwrk on 9/23/19, 11:53 PM

  Great idea. Kudos for launch. Bookmarked.

  What striked me is JSHeapTotalSize, never really think the ADs are eating so much RAM / resources (make sense). In Guardian case this accounts for 50% more allocation.

• by thenewnewguy on 9/23/19, 11:31 PM

  Minor typo on the website: "or to proof to others they should use an ad blocker" (should be "as proof" or "to prove").

  Also, suggestion: don't require typing http:// or https://

• by radicalriddler on 9/24/19, 5:42 AM

  TheGuardian is such a shit site without adblock. During the Australian election, I turned off my adblocker because "they're an independent news source" and I wanted to support their advertisers. I got bombarded with a full width banner at the top, and full height banner down both sides for the national Greens party.

  Now don't get me wrong, I don't hate the greens party, but god damn, my eyes.

• by codeisawesome on 9/24/19, 6:37 AM

  I'm not sure why the code isn't open source on this one. If the OP is hoping that news websites (etc.,) will pay for this service, I wouldn't hold my breath.

  This site only highlights all the bad things happening on those sites - and the marketing teams there have most likely already been told by their developers what including 1 million cookies & 50 million tracker APIs will do to the performance. They want this gunk in there so that revenue targets can be met.

  So the best bet is to put this up on GitHub where folks like me could learn from the code :-D

• by njitram on 9/24/19, 7:51 AM

  Nice way to see if EU sites are GDPR compliant, because you didn't give consent when hitting a website those websites should not use any external tags yet. You can see for example nos.nl or lemonde.fr are fairly clean, but bbc.com or bild.de are not, even though there is no consent.

• by nreece on 9/24/19, 7:11 AM

  Question for the developer: any particular reason you're using Chrome with xvfb rather than just headless. Its been stable for a while.

• by phobonym on 9/24/19, 6:06 AM

  Nice, I like this.

  Would be nice if there was a way to display/download all cached results. Would be a nice dataset for visualisation or a dashboard.

• by bscphil on 9/24/19, 5:55 AM

  I found a bug: when I enter a URL into the form it seems to URLencode the characters, but this doesn't work on the site. That is, [1] works, [2] spins on "status: queued" forever. As far as I know I don't have any particular settings or extensions that would cause the URL to be unexpectedly encoded. Edit: it's not doing it right now, which is weird. It was just a moment ago, but maybe it was fixed? I had assumed the backend was down.

  [1] https://webtest.app/?url=https://bbc.co.uk

  [2] https://webtest.app/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbbc.co.uk

• by regnerba on 9/23/19, 11:42 PM

  Why does the Reddit page get bigger with uBlock Origin? From 2.73 MB on Chrome to 8.48 with uBlock Origin.

  https://webtest.app/?url=https://reddit.com

• by merpnderp on 9/24/19, 3:02 AM

  Quite often I’m getting 2-3x the load times for ublock.

  https://webtest.app/?url=https://news.ycombinator.com

• by andrerm on 9/24/19, 12:04 AM

  Great work.

  Without uBO, Forbes loads 151 cookies.

• by jackewiehose on 9/23/19, 11:46 PM

  https://news.ycombinator.com takes a second longer with uBlock

• by arnley on 9/24/19, 7:57 AM

  Thanks for sharing this gem.

  Did you consider computing the Speed Index? [1]

  It would help assessing the performance impact these ads have.

  [1] https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/using-webpag...

• by Rarok on 9/25/19, 8:53 AM

  Fun, I tried it with a regional newspapper and it doesn't shows the processing and load time in the versiones without adblock.

  Also I never realized it was SO BAD without adblock

  https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/

• by dddddaviddddd on 9/23/19, 11:26 PM

  Excellent way to show the weight of ads and trackers, very clean side by side comparison.

• by taf2 on 9/25/19, 12:06 AM

  Interesting to see many sites load faster without uBlock because DOM content loaded is faster... it would be nice if we could run more scientific measurement to get a better understanding of the load time differences.

• by drenvuk on 9/24/19, 3:23 AM

  I'm stuck in a queue. more workers please, this is awesome.

• by gnrlst on 9/24/19, 7:56 AM

  When I test your own site (webtest.app), it doesn't work. I was hoping for some introspection!

• by a_imho on 9/24/19, 8:36 AM

  Not using something like ublock is simply bad hygiene.

• by NightlyDev on 9/24/19, 5:22 AM

  Adblockers in chrome are slow. Fast pages goes from having no noticeable delay to having one. Many times the latency is not uncommon. Sure, this is only a problem for really fast pages, but it's still really annoying.