Show HN: Analytics and Ad Blocker (Mv3 Ad Blocker)

[conschy]

Hi All,

I created my company: Globemallow.io. Browser extensions for reducing the carbon footprint of the internet.

Globemallow calculates CO2 emitted and energy (kWh) usage on webpage load, and provides a personalized sustainable development report on how each page can become more efficient from a sustainable development perspective. An Internet Sustainability Grade is calculated for each webpage.

While working on Globemallow, I realized that a significant portion of websites had larger load times due to an asinine amount of analytics (tracking) and advertising scripts executing on each page.

Analytics & Ad Blocker became the second browser extension I created. It blocks analytics and advertising scripts from executing. On more marketing advertisement reliant sites users can typically expect a ~50% faster load time- significantly increasing a site’s Internet Sustainability Grade.

[XCSme]

> larger load times due to an asinine amount of analytics (tracking) and advertising scripts executing on each page

I think most of the extra bandwidth and load times come simply for the large assets use (unoptimized/large/unused images, font files, css files and JS files). Most JS scripts are usually under 100kb, but an unoptimized image can add a few megabytes of extra data.

Also, if it's for development, why would it be a browser extension? Most website-testing tools are external (e.g. pingdom page speed test/google pagespeed), as you only want it to use at a specific time on a single website.

I am also a big confused, is it a development tool or an ad-blocking tool?

[conschy]

There's 2 applications on the same website. Globemallow is for a sustainable web development practice feedback.

Analytics and Ad Blocker is the ad blocking tool.

>I think most of the extra bandwidth and load times come simply for the large assets use

You are correct. Size does come from images, but page load times and CPU usage generally comes from the scripts and additional requests from analytics and advertisement scripts. When a page is just spinning waiting to load the content it significantly increases the energy usage of a website.

[XCSme]

How it does compare with the built-in DevTools or other ad-blockers like uBlock or using a browser like Brave that blocks by default ads and trackers?

[conschy]

It is comparable- uBlock is a great tool. I wanted to create a more intuitive UI and user experience than what uBlock currently offers. There's also free reporting on my tool that allows you to see the differences in blocked content between each site.

Brave is good, but doesn't have market share. I wanted to build a product for browsers with the largest market share to help preserve privacy at scale.

[rajasimon]

why you need to block analytics? As a bloggers I just need to know how many views I get daily. And with this kind of tool I don't get that anymore.

And I see that you use Google Analytics for your own website and what do you think about that?

[conschy]

Privacy.

You're not getting those metrics from other products like Ghostery, uBlock.

Also, browsers built for privacy are not showing up as metrics either.

I think generally analytics are incredibly helpful, but they've been abused. There should not be a way that individual users show be able to be identified by their browser analytics.

While working on this project that amount of data that I've seen collected on individuals is terrifying.

Perhaps you could use some other metric for success? Like adding the ability to "like" an article, or share? I know some individuals add the ability to click a button to "Continue Article" or something to track engagement.