Firefox version: benchmarking memory footprint (2015 03 07)

^{Infamous VIM test: ABP 1,900 MB vs. uBlock 392 MB. Firefox 35 64-bit. ABP systematically adds around 3.5 MB per page and per-frame on a page, when using only EasyList.}

Setup

1. Ensure the blocker is the only active extension (to avoid results to be polluted by other extensions)
2. Ensure click-to-play (or whatever equivalent) is enabled before launching the benchmark
3. Select the following filter lists in the benchmarked blockers:
   • EasyList
   • Peter Lowe's Ad server list
   • EasyPrivacy
   • Fanboy's Social Blocking List
   • Malware domain lists
   • ABP-specifics: "Acceptable ads" disabled
   • uBlock-specifics: uBlock's filters enabled (+80 filters), extra malware domains (+1,459 filters)

Steps

1. Have the benchmarked blocker enabled and properly setup
2. Have only the "new tab" opened
3. Quit Firefox
4. Launch Firefox
5. Paste http://news.yahoo.com/ in address bar, wait for page to finish loading
6. Open new tab, paste http://news.google.com/, wait for page to finish loading
7. Open new tab, paste http://www.huffingtonpost.com/, wait for page to finish loading
8. Open new tab, paste http://www.cnn.com/, wait for page to finish loading
9. Open new tab, paste http://www.nytimes.com/, wait for page to finish loading
10. Open new tab, paste http://www.foxnews.com/, wait for page to finish loading
11. Open new tab, paste http://www.nbcnews.com/, wait for page to finish loading
12. Open new tab, paste http://www.dailymail.co.uk/, wait for page to finish loading
13. Open new tab, paste http://www.washingtonpost.com/, wait for page to finish loading
14. Open new tab, paste http://www.theguardian.com/, wait for page to finish loading
15. Open new tab, paste https://news.ycombinator.com/, wait for page to finish loading
16. Leave the browser idle for two minutes
17. Open new tab, paste about:memory, wait for page to finish loading
18. Firefox: Click "Minimize memory usage" button in "Free memory" section
19. Firefox: Click Measure button in "Show memory reports" section
20. Firefox: Write down "Explicit Allocations" value (see notes below) / Chromium: Write down Σ value

So I did the exact above steps for no blocker, ABP, uBlock.

Results

• Firefox
  • No blocker: 613.55 MB (reference memory usage)
  • Adblock Plus 2.6.6: 625.05 MB (reference plus 11.5 MB)
  • µBlock 0.8.2.0: 426.85 MB (reference minus 186.7 MB, ABP minus 198.2 MB)
• Chromium
  • No blocker: 1,169.35 MB (reference memory usage)
  • Adblock Plus 1.8.8: 1,509.05 MB (reference plus 339.7 MB)
  • µBlock 0.8.2.0: 1,042.94 MB (reference minus 126.41 MB, ABP minus 466.11 MB)

Important: You can't compare directly the figures between the browsers -- they are taken using different methodology from one browser to the other. The benchmarks are more to compare the figures for various blockers within the same browser.

Notes

Tested on Firefox 34 64-bit and Chromium 39 64-bit on Linux Mint. No other extensions were present.

For Firefox, I chose the "Explicit Allocations" figure because as per Firefox, it is "the single best number to focus on" with regard to memory usage.

Without going into details, hardware is i5 quadcore + 8 GB

If other users feel like repeating the tests, it would be nice just to confirm I got everything right.

Raw data

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/doc/benchmarks/mem-usage-overall-20141224.ods