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by SudoNick 4416 days ago
I think this is the fourth or fifth time, in recent memory, that I've seen someone from Mozilla criticize Adblock Plus and call on its developers to make changes. ABP startup time and memory consumption were subjects I recall, and its general impact on page load times may have been as well.

I can understand Mozilla taking some interest in how addons behave, and constructive feedback on extensions is a good thing. However, ABP is the type of extension that is likely to have issues in those areas because of what it does. Which is very important to users, especially those who rely upon it for its privacy and security enhancing capabilities. It is those users who should decide whether the performance and resource usage trade-offs are acceptable. Mozilla shouldn't make, or try to make, such decisions.

The situation with ABP 2.6 (https://adblockplus.org/development-builds/faster-firefox-st..., https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=22906) might not be a case of this, but that along with the wider pattern of platform developers being more controlling, does make me somewhat concerned about Mozilla taking too much interest in extensions. I hope my worries are for naught.

1 comments

I'm the author of the post. I was extremely careful to keep the tone of the post neutral. This paragraph sums it up:

> So, it’s clear that ABP greatly increases Firefox’s memory usage. Now, this isn’t all bad. Many people (including me!) will be happy with this trade-off — they will gladly use extra memory in order to block ads. But if you’re using a low-end machine without much memory, you might have different priorities.

If you think this post is unreasonable, I think your skin is too thin.

I noticed that you said that, and expected others to notice as well. I don't really think your post unreasonable. I'm just a little concerned that, even in a case of pure intentions and desire for balance, extension developers may feel pressured to make changes and end up sacrificing features or effectiveness.

Did you notice how some people here, and at your blog, proposed modifications what would trade coverage for memory consumption? Even if that would result in known filter hits being eliminated, and also without qualifying that if such an approach were adopted it should be preference based?