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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 May 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.

May 2, 2014

HTTPSB
BA/AX		 Ghostery Adblock+ HTTPSB
AA/BX		 Disconnect Privacy Badger
beta 		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 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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