Does Adblock slow down Firefox?

Does Adblock slow down Firefox? You might have heard of the Adblock extension that has a massive list of URL filters to block out adverts from most websites. Does this slow down Firefox, considering that for every little image and flash it has to consult that massive URL whitelist?
Asked by: Guest \| Views: 140

Total answers/comments: 2

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Guest [Entry]

"Most of the blocked content is made up of flash files, images and scripts.
These are quite large and require time to download.

So, by blocking them Adblock actually improves the loading time, sometimes by a lot."

Guest [Entry]

"It doesn't seem to slow Firefox down. If anything the impression I get is that sites load faster as they don't have to fetch so much data.

You could do some timings with Adblock turned on and off, but there are so many variables (caches, network latency etc.) that the numbers you get wouldn't be particularly useful."