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AdBlock for Safari 5 is a POS

nope7308

nope7308

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Oct 6, 2008
1,040
537
Ontario, Canada
Well, sort of. I appreciate the work the developers have done, but the extension is utterly useless (IMO, anyway).

As a warning to others, I was experiencing severe performance issues when I had AdBlock installed/enabled. Safari would hang from 5-30 seconds, sometimes crashing entirely. It took me a painstakingly long time to identify the culprit (AdBlock).

Not only did I experience performance issues, but it did not block all advertisements - at least not the ones that AdBlock for Firefox does. For instance, when I viewed certain embedded videos, I would have to watch a one minute ad first. This did not occur when I viewed the same page/video in Firefox (with AdBlock installed).

I'm curious to know why Apple approved this extension even though it doesn't appear to work all that well. Aside from failing to block all advertisements, it undermines the stability of Safari. If that's not a reason to reject an extension, I'm not sure what is.

If you're interested, here is a website that causes Safari to hang, without fail, when AdBlock is installed/enabled (www.mmajunkie.com). If I'm the only one experiencing this issue, then my sincere apologies to the AdBlock developers!
 
I haven't had any issues with AdBlock yet. This is on a MacBook 1,3 and everything updated.

I didn't have any hangs with the website either, but my internet is slow enough that I might not notice a 1-3 second hang anyway...
 
My experience hasn't been the same. Part of it depends on the list to subscribe to for blocks. I've had good success with ad blocking with it. Apple doesn't care how effective a plug-in may be. They mostly just check for malicious ones.

I didn't really have any hanging on the link you provided and I saw no ads on the page so it seems things worked.
 
Really? I find that surprising.

When AdBlock is enabled, try navigating to that webpage and try scrolling down before the page fully loads. When I attempt this, the scroll is very choppy and then the spinning beach ball appears. Does this happen with you?

I just reinstalled AdBlock and the performance issues reappeared. I doubt the difference is attributable to the subscription, as we're probably using the same one (I'm in Canada). This is uber annoying because I would really like a reliable ad-blocking extension!
 
I've had the same experience: Safari hangs when scrolling before the page is fully loaded. The whole system can hang sometimes, including the Dock. Very annoying, especially because AdBlock for Safari 4 worked very well.

As I understand, this is a port of an ad-blocking plugin for Chrome. Did people have the same experience with that combo?
 
Yeah, I also get the beach ball for a couple of secs, and scrolling is virtually impossible while the page is still loading.... annoying.

EDIT: I just tried to open the same site without Adblock, and everything was fine!

To the OP: I suggest you report this issue to the developer... I just did the same, so I'm hoping this issue can be addressed soon...
 
Adblock does slow down loading on a few sites for me but on the whole it seems to work pretty well. When it first came out as an extension for safari 5 it used to crash all the time but things have got much better since. I love the quick blacklisting feature, out of control sites like digg look much better now.

One major gripe I do have with it is that according do the website, it supposedly prevents things from being downloaded, but it's obviously not always the case because lots of the time I can see an object load and then subsequently disappear.
 
No performance issues here. Adblocking working well as well. You might try and delete/reinstall the extension?
 
I've experienced the same issue as the thread op. As soon as I installed the ad blocker, Safari came to a screeching halt. :(
 
Hi all, this is Michael, the developer of AdBlock for Safari.

The extension is definitely *not* supposed to slow down Safari :) Thanks for submitting a bug report at chromeadblock.com/bugs, and I'm looking into it.

Once it's fixed, anybody who's got "Automatic Update" turned on should get the fix automatically. I'd recommend you turn it on under Preferences -> Extensions.

Thanks, and sorry for the trouble,
Michael
 
Honest question: Why use this at all? I have Glimmer Blocker installed and don't see ads ever. And it works in Chrome as a bonus with no extra effort.
 
LurkingIowan said:
Honest question: Why use this at all? I have Glimmer Blocker installed and don't see ads ever. And it works in Chrome as a bonus with no extra effort.
Click to expand...

AdBlock is an official extension, whereas Glimmer Blocker is more of a hack and isn't integrated into the browser. It only acts as a proxy and is configured outside of the browser so it's harder to make changes and exceptions on the fly. There's a few solutions for ad blocking and everyone has their reasons for using each.
 
Would it be possible to move the prefs to the extensions panel, rather than having to keep a toolbar button just to access prefs in a web page interface?
 
I have the same issue with embedded video & "ads by Google" showing up. I have to switch to FireFox any time I want to watch my friend's Ustream, because I end up with commercials that pop up every 2 minutes; with FF, I get uninterrupted stream :)
 
I'll add my displeasure with AdBlock to the pile... Safari was constantly giving me spinning beach balls and very choppy scrolling, loading pages extremely slowly and becoming a huge RAM hog. Once I uninstalled AdBlock, my issues with Safari cleared right up, and it once again loaded pages quickly and effortlessly.
 
The issue is currently being looked into, so hopefully we can expect a fix soon!
 
Hellhammer said:
Have you tried Safari AdBlocker? It has worked fine for me
Click to expand...

I was using AdBlocker for a while, but when I took my MacBook Pro to the Genius Bar for kernel panics (tied to the graphics extensions but also referenced WebKitPluginHost), they said that they weren't comfortable with my system using a program that used SIMBL and that might be causing the kernel panics. So I uninstalled it.
 
My experience have been the complete opposite, but i'm sure the developer appreciates the bug reports. To the OP, next time, instead of creating a thread were the title includes POS, just send in a bug report to the developer. It's not like he gets paid for the work, so maybe be a bit more appreciative of the work he does.
 
RockTheGlobe said:
I was using AdBlocker for a while, but when I took my MacBook Pro to the Genius Bar for kernel panics (tied to the graphics extensions but also referenced WebKitPluginHost), they said that they weren't comfortable with my system using a program that used SIMBL and that might be causing the kernel panics. So I uninstalled it.
Click to expand...

I've had zero issues with it and have used it since Snow Leopard as it was the first 64-bit AdBlocker for Safari that I found
 
I've had a slew of problems with it lately blocking CSS and style sheets from various websites.

I currently have it disabled. I'm not looking forward to going back to the SIMBL hack option, but it's looking like I might have to.
 
hmm interesting.

I recently reinstalled SL and never downloaded FF because I wanted to try out Safari 5 with the new extensions. I downloaded adblock right away and noticed the issue you're describing. I never thought it was related to adblock but rather it was just safari. This issue was making me very unhappy. Now I have to decide. Safari with no ads but performance issues, or Safari with no performance issues but with ads. hmmm maybe I should just go back to FF with adblock. :rolleyes:
 
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