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Comparative benchmarks against widely used blockers: Top 15 Most Popular News Websites

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Raymond Hill edited this page Jun 4, 2014 · 103 revisions

The results emphasize 3rd-party requests, as these are, I believe, a key statistics when it comes to gauge privacy matters. The rationale being that the more a user push data to more 3rd parties (a mere net request is pushing data) -- typically without the user being aware -- the larger the footprint of leaked metadata. It is difficult for a user to appreciate how much metadata is leaked to 3rd parties when visiting a web page, as requests to 3rd-party agents are not easy to see, let alone easy to act upon. This is where HTTP Switchboard will help you the most.

The values are averages of aggregated results of the 15 web page visited over 5 runs. In the table, a result reported as "x n" means "3rd-party count total count".

The most important figure in my opinion with regard to privacy is the 3rd-party Domain count, hence the results are ordered from left-to-right according to the third-party domain count.

June 4, 2014

HTTPSB
BA/AX		 HTTPSB
AA/BX		 Adblock Adguard Privacy
Badger		 No blocker
Domains 21
22 		52
53 		74
75 		93
94 		157
158 		401
402
Hosts 48
74 		97
143 		128
183 		150
222 		236
316 		596
683
Scripts 0
0 		183
263 		215
299 		235
321 		308
406 		505
625
Cookies 0
0 		2
34 		8
49 		20
74 		38
99 		231
317
Net requests 625
1,217 		879
1,653 		1,025
1,864 		1,044
1,911 		1,144
2,021 		1,973
2,980
Bandwidth 16,645,571 ? 25,884,484 ? ? 29,375,024

From now on I'm going to benchmark other blockers too, in rotation. I will keep providing benchmarks for HTTPSB in BA/AX and AA/BX mode, and No blocker stats, so the results from these can be used as "anchors" to compare blockers across benchmarks. For example, with the above results, I can say that using HTTPSB's results as anchors, Ghostery and Adblock Plus perform better privacy-wise than Adblock, Adguard AdBlocker and Privacy Badger. Note: This time I primed Privacy Badger before the benchmark.

May 2, 2014

HTTPSB
BA/AX		 Ghostery Adblock+ HTTPSB
AA/BX		 Disconnect Privacy
Badger		 No blocker
Domains 21
22 		52
53 		54
55 		54
55 		93
94 		192
193 		420
421
Hosts 49
75 		99
160 		97
149 		101
153 		171
248 		299
381 		641
720
Scripts 0
0 		173
286 		177
272 		169
265 		262
385 		334
455 		518
641
Cookies 0
0 		8
47 		1
33 		2
43 		19
83 		52
115 		263
341
Net requests 680
1,199 		966
1,722 		913
1,612 		930
1,648 		1,124
1,936 		1,340
2,176 		2,079
2,849
Bandwidth 15,147,576 27,406,535 26,489,990 27,040,340 28,758,904 ? ?

Changes from previous benchmark: EFF-backed Privacy Badger (beta) added, see these important notes, mostly, the results for Privacy Badger represent a worst-case scenario as the extension improves with usage (next benchmark I will prime it beforehand). Starting with HTTP Switchboard version 0.8.6.4, Fanboy's specialized lists are not longer enabled by default.

February 26, 2014

HTTPSB
BA/AX		 HTTPSB
AA/BX		 Ghostery Adblock+ Disconnect No blocker
Domains 21
22 		45
46 		48
49 		53
54 		87
88 		412
413
Hosts 49
78 		89
142 		98
165 		96
152 		153
232 		609
697
Scripts 0
0 		171
282 		176
291 		175
280 		252
392 		525
677
Cookies 0
0 		3
43 		5
48 		2
35 		16
85 		231
316
Net requests 630
1,229 		941
1,710 		965
1,794 		920
1,698 		1,063
2,018 		2,120
3,048
Bandwidth 16,342,053 26,603,582 26,502,113 26,714,512 27,950,492 31,282,722

Change from previous benchmark: Starting with HTTP Switchboard version 0.8.3.0, all preset lists of blocked hosts are enabled by default, except of for the huge "assets/thirdparties/hosts-file.net/hosts.txt". This allows HTTPSB in allow-all/block-exceptionally mode to perform well when compared to other blockers.

January 24, 2014

HTTPSB
BA/AX		 Ghostery Adblock+ HTTPSB
AA/BX		 Disconnect No blocker
Domains 24
25 		54
55 		59
60 		69
70 		91
92 		476
477
Hosts 55
82 		109
183 		107
169 		126
200 		157
240 		693
785
Scripts 0
0 		176
307 		173
293 		187
327 		235
391 		534
698
Cookies 0
0 		4
54 		1
44 		10
73 		12
86 		299
389
Net requests 651
1,232 		1,064
1,921 		1,019
1,815 		1,087
1,934 		1,103
2,091 		2,300
3,236
Bandwidth 14,935,325 25,128,116 25,150,853 25,785,433 26,007,184 28,855,067

See also

Notes

Methodology

Benchmarks were done using Browser session benchmark. The script used is:

wait 3
repeat 5
clear cache
clear cookies
http://news.yahoo.com/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
http://www.cnn.com/
http://news.google.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/
http://www.foxnews.com/
http://www.theguardian.com/
http://www.nbcnews.com/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/
http://www.usatoday.com/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
http://www.wsj.com/
http://www.abcnews.go.com/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
http://www.latimes.com/

List taken from Top 15 Most Popular News Websites | January 2014.

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