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by choppaface 3932 days ago
The 64-bit CPUs have a wider (and thus effectively faster) bus, and content blocking is probably rather strenuous on CPU cache (lots of string/pattern matching?). While the 64-bit cutoff is likely mostly a marketing artifact, content blocking on 32-bit CPUs could actually be 2x slower or worse than 64-bit CPUs and thus make page rendering times very painful for some sites.
1 comments
Yetanfou 3932 days ago
Nope, it is pure marketing. There is no technical reason whatsoever for ad-blocking to require a 64 bit CPU or databus. It actually works fine on a single-core sub-Ghz ARM7 like that used in my phone (Motorola Defy) with all of 512MiB of memory.
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choppaface 3931 days ago
Huh, did you really run iOS9 ad blocking on a Motorola Defy? I definitely believe Apple's position is 99% marketing, but I can imagine there are some common pages that load really slow on older hardware. I've seen older iPads crash consistently trying to render complicated pages.
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Yetanfou 3930 days ago
Of course I did not run iOS on that Defy, why would I? Ad blocking was everywhere before apple finally decided to allow it on iOS. Inside those idevices are ARM-based CPUs, just like the ones in most other mobile hardware. What difference does it make whether the OS is based on Linux (Android), Mach/BSD (iOS) or even Windows (...Windows)? A regexp is a regexp after all...

The Defy does not crash rendering complex pages. It can get pretty slow though, reason for running extensions like NoScript for Android [1] (which runs just fine on the Fdroid.org Fennec build, ie. Firefox without the nasty bits) and uBlock origin.

[1] https://noscript.net/nsa/

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