Adblock Plus is a memory hog in Chrome and Firefox

The popular Adblock Plus extension may be hogging your computer’s memory. Mozilla developer Nicholas Nethercote published a blog post today explaining why Adblock Plus doing this.

The problem comes from Adblock Plus loading custom CSS stylesheets into every website it loads. This wouldn’t be a problem except for widespread use of iframes, which act like separate websites, causing Adblock to load the stylesheet many times.

Each stylesheet takes up 4MB, which can add up for websites that feature lots of ads with iframes. Even social sharing buttons for Facebook and Twitter are created with iframes.

It’s a bit ironic that Adblock Plus is causing performance issues when it aims to increase performance by not having ads load.

Mozilla and Adblock Plus are working together to resolve the issue. You can follow the bug report to see what’s being done.

“We’re doing the best we can to figure out what’s wrong and where, then fix it if it’s on our end,” said Adblock Plus spokesperson Ben Williams.

If you find Firefox or Chrome running slowly, you may want to disable Adblock to see if performance improves.

Source: Nicholas Nethercote

Follow Lewis on Twitter @lewisleong

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