[tor-talk] ads slow Tor Browser dramatically

[Joe Btfsplk]

On 11/6/2012 4:44 PM, Mike Perry wrote:
>
> I am deeply opposed to shipping an always-on universal adblocker with
> the default TBB. I think it would be political suicide in terms of
> accomplishing our goals with acceptance of Tor users by sites, lobbying
> for private browsing origin changes, and convincing the world that
> privacy by design is possible without resorting to filtering schemes
> and/or DNT-style begging.
Thanks Mike.  I'd probably agree w/ that & was aware of that potential 
issue.  The ad servers don't care if their ads are delivered to an 
anonymous user, as long as they're delivered.
But individually, many users don't want them - for the reasons you 
stated & speed issue.  Unfortunately, some sites have such large, pop 
up, flashing ads, you can't see the page.  And some are very persistent.
Sometimes, even respected sites have them on "special" occasions.

Regardless of political issues, I stand by my statement that *some* 
pages have too many / too large of ads, causing TBB to time out, at 
times.  I suppose the time out period could be adjusted.
But, it's a long time to wait.  Political & finger printing issues 
aside, same pages w/ ads blocked usually load much quicker.
I never said it'd be an easy or good decision, but I suspect the extra 
load on Tor network from ads is much larger than most would think.  If 
pages in TBB or Fx often take 3 - 5 sec longer to load, that's substantial.
> Further, adblocker filter choices are fingerprintable.
I'm only using AdBlock as an example.  But in reality, if 90% of all TBB 
- English users had [something like] AdBlock & they all used [something 
like] either "Easy List" or "Fanboy's List," how easy would it be to 
fingerprint one among all TBB - English users?
I'd guess it'd be more of a problem for small groups of other languages.

> (though safebrowsing filters are supposed to exist for this
> last reason and we do use those).
Which safe browsing filters are those?  Not Google's?  Because they're 
disabled in TBB (fine w/ me).  NoScript?