The Bloat Free Web – How to Browse Faster and Avoid Online Bottlenecks

Since it was first invented by Tim Berners-Lee, the World Wide Web (not to be confused with the Internet) has come a long way. Today websites provide users with a more immersive experience, increased interactivity, complex designs as well as real-time collaboration and community tools, mostly free of cost.

Obviously, the technologies used to achieve this kind of usability come at a price—your bandwidth, connectivity speed and processing power are used at an alarming rate, not to mention the free services are generally paid through advertisements shown in the page. While advertisements are a great way to maintain websites, they may be distracting and also slow down your browsing speed considerably, especially on a slower connection.

The Solution

There are free tools all of the major browsers that block ads, and in this post, I will cover one such tool available for Google’s Chrome, and then check its impact on bandwidth usage and load times in a statistical comparison.

For tests of this kind, it is very important to make sure that they are conducted in a realistic environment condition. For this reason, we tested this tool on a standard netbook with a dual core 1.50GHz Intel Atom Processor and 1 GB of RAM. My connection speed is 18 Mbps (to my router), with download speeds ranging from 6 Mbps during low activity times to 2.5 Mbps at peak times of the day.

During this test, I’ve kept the same distance to my Wi-Fi router. My browser of choice, Google Chrome, was tested five times, before and after installing the specific add-on—I then averaged the results. For testing purposes, I chose a handful of sites from Alexa’s top 500 websites, including Alexa itself. However, I’ve ignored the first few due to the fact that hardly any of them display any advertisements (which are mostly web 2.0 elements) on their homepages. Text-only ad blocking was also not considered, as the difference of load times was negligible. A complete list of sites tested can be found here. Javascript was kept enabled as several sites use it in combination with HTML5. Flash® was also kept enabled, as several sites use this technology for things other than ads like uploads, photo galleries, etc. The browser cache was completely cleared before each test and the tests were conducted during peak load times.

Google Chrome test: Access time of all of the listed sites, with and without AdBlock enabled.

Due to the limited number of add-ons available for Google Chrome, we were left with the AdBlock add-on only. AdBlock’s primary job is to block any ads on websites. The graph below shows the average time taken to open all of the listed sites, each taken individually, with and without AdBlock enabled. For your reference, please note that the smaller the number is, the better the results are.

(seconds)

As you can see, with a simple add-on, you’ll save a lot of time while browsing the web via Google Chrome and more importantly, you can finally focus on the content, rather than blinking ads. However, Firefox and Internet Explorer users can also benefit from similar tools. For users of Firefox, AdBlock Plus can be downloaded here, while Internet Explorer users may download and install the Simple Adblock to achieve similar results. What do you think about this post? Leave a comment—your thoughts are appreciated!