Adblock Plus 3.4 promises 50% memory use reduction

Eyeo GmbH, the company behind the widely used adblocking browser extension Adblock Plus, released Adblock Plus 3.4 today.
Adblock Plus 3.4 features a number of changes, most notable a promised reduction of the extension's memory use by 50%. The new version includes changes to the user interface as well.
Existing users should receive the update to the new version automatically in Firefox, Chrome and Opera; those who prefer to download updates manually can do so from the browser's extensions store on the Internet or by visiting the Adblock Plus download page.
The new version of the extension is available for Firefox, Chrome and Opera currently and not other supported browsers such as Safari, Microsoft Edge, or Internet Explorer.
Adblock Plus 3.4
The user interface has changed quite a bit in Adblock Plus. The extension icon highlights the number of blocked ads on the activate site. Existing users may notice that the frontend interface has changed significantly in the new version of the extension.
The extension displays a toggle in the new version that you may activate to enable or disable ad blocking on the site. It highlights the number of blocked items and the total number of items on the page, and lists options to block elements or report issues.
Several elements of previous versions of Adblock Plus have been removed. The social media icons are gone and so is the number of ads blocked in total.
The blocking functionality that is accessible on the frontend has not changed functionality-wise. Adblock Plus never offered the same level of depth that extensions such as uBlock Origin or NoScript offered; it is for instance not possible to get information about the content that was blocked on the site.
The options page looks identical, nothing appears to have changed on the page.
Eyeo GMBH claims that Adblock Plus 3.4 uses 50% less memory than previous versions of the extension. The release notes of the Firefox version of the extension state the following:
Reduced the initial memory footprint by ~16%, base memory usage by ~28%, and memory used per frame by ~660 KB.
Users of the extension should notice a reduction in memory usage when they use Adblock Plus 3.4 but it seems likely that the experience will be somewhat different considering that it depends on several factors such as the number of frames opened in the browser.
A quick, unscientific test in the latest Chrome Stable version, showed that Adblock Plus does use more memory than uBlock Origin even if the latest version is installed. I installed both extensions and started Chrome to see how much they would use with just one page open. It is possible that there are incompatibilities or issues that distort the result.
Closing Words
Adblock Plus using less memory than before is definitely a welcome change. Let us know in the comments if you are a user of the extension and noticed an improvement in the memory use of the extension.
Now You: which blocking solution do you use?


Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.