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Comparative benchmarks against widely used blockers: Top 15 Most Popular News Websites
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.
| 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. 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.
| 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.
| 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.
| 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 |
- Top 15 Most Popular Business Websites
- Top 15 Most Popular Tech & Gadget Websites
- Top 15 Most Popular Blogs
- Methodology and notes
- HTTPSBBA/AX means HTTP Switchboard with block-all/allow-exceptionally mode (out-of-the-box settings).
- HTTPSBAA/BX means HTTP Switchboard in allow-all/block-exceptionally mode, with out-of-the-box preset blacklists.
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.