I'm just blown away by Bluhell Firewall!

Discussion in 'other software & services' started by ratchet, May 24, 2014.

  1. ratchet

    ratchet Registered Member

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    I'm reading one of the adblocking threads today and one other time recently. Both times I see Bluhell Firewall mentioned, so today I tried it. Just amazing! I have a really fast PC. An SSD, Ivybridge 3570K CPU and eight gigs of RAM, yet starting a browser session with Cyberfox or Firefox was never instantaneous. I'd just always assumed it was because of Sandboxie. Memory consumption has been from the low 300,000k to mid 300,000k. It never concerned me since I rarely even ever use two of the eight gigs of RAM. Now a session opens instantly and memory is always the low 200,000k. The developer is getting my $5 donation!
     
  2. Q Section

    Q Section Registered Member

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  3. allizomeniz

    allizomeniz Registered Member

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    I just use NoScript and make google.com, facebook.com. twitter.com and photobucket.com untrusted and that solves 90% of problems. :argh:
     
  4. DoctorPC

    DoctorPC Banned

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    Why do they only develop this for Firefox? Firefox is on a pretty big decline, and is one of the least used browsers now. It kind of grinds me when a dev does this, like ones that ignore Android for Icrap stuff.
     
  5. Wroll

    Wroll Registered Member

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    Because he can. I just ordered a phone with FirefoxOS. Are you going to question why did I bought a phone with 0.0001 market share?
     
  6. guest

    guest Guest

    just use cyberfox :D
     
  7. chris1341

    chris1341 Guest

    Definitely the lightest I've tried but not the most effective. Adguard beta for FF is a good half-way house -lighter and zipper that ABP but just as effective.

    Cheers
     
  8. gorhill

    gorhill Guest

    The description on Firefox is misleading:

    How this is achieved is thanks to just five hard-coded blocking rules covering about 7000 .com and .net domains, these were auto-generated from Easylist. That means, every time a certain resource wants to be loaded we will have to iterate through a list of five items, rather than for each entry from a common Easylist which contains thousands of different items to check... You can now figure things out for yourself...​

    There is a suggestion in there that Adblock Plus does iterate through "thousands of different items to check" each net request URL, while Bluhell iterates only through five.

    It's just nonsense. Adblock Plus of course uses a dictionary to avoid going through thousands of filters, there is no other sensible way. I myself measured the dictionary efficiency of Adblock, and it's more like 107 filters/URL when EasyList and EasyPrivacy are used.

    The "just five hard-coded blocking rules" described are actually seven gigantic regular expression, and I am entirely unconvinced these are more efficient than a well structured dictionary.

    Also, Adblock Plus filters take into account more than just what is in the URL, there is the first-party/3rd-party status, request types, domain specificity, etc. and I doubt this is taken into account by Bluhell.

    So there is some kind of not too honest marketing trick going on with the description.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: May 25, 2014
  9. mantra

    mantra Registered Member

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    hi
    is there a compare between adblock and bluehell firewall ?
    i mean about ads blocking

    thanks
     
  10. mantra

    mantra Registered Member

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    is really on a big decline ?
    it's like chrome, internet explorer doesn't count :D ,it's installed on every microsoft os
    thanks
     
  11. DBone

    DBone Registered Member

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    Seems good to me. Lower resources on my 2GB machine.
     
  12. Wroll

    Wroll Registered Member

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    My experience with it is that adblock is doing better on regional websites and with flash videos adds.
     
  13. ratchet

    ratchet Registered Member

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    I can't comment on the embellishment other than to say I take your word for it, however, I've never been one to state things like, "it feels or seems faster," but absolutely a session start now is 2x/3x quicker.
    Task manager is objective analysis and memory consumption is indeed down 33%. Also, I have not seen one add yet but have had to "allow" for three sites since last night.
     
  14. gorhill

    gorhill Guest

    I believe you. What you call "embellishment", I call it misleading. The extension is valuable in itself because it improves mem and CPU footprint over Adblock if one is ready to sacrifice some filter coverage. It should just say so without BS. Why misrepresents how ABP works internally if the extension is intrinsically valuable?
     
  15. Alhaitham

    Alhaitham Registered Member

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    @gorhill

    Just FYI

    You tested the latest version

    Have been following the progress of the addon from the start and the description was written when it was called HellBoy Firewall a long time ago

    So the description doesn't seem misleading but rather outdated
     
  16. Q Section

    Q Section Registered Member

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    It is only a subjective evaluation in a few hours time here. There is no comparison that is known currently.
     
  17. gorhill

    gorhill Guest

    What is outdated, and I suspected so is the "five" instead of "seven". The misleading I am referring to is to suggest that Adblock will test thousands of rules for every URL. That's just not true. It's a strawman: imagine the worst way to implement the enforcing of EasyList filters, and suggest your "competitors" are using this nonsensical implementation.

    And the article you linked to confirm my fear of that kind of misrepresentation: it just repeats the claim, unchecked: "So, instead of having to go through thousands of items to check, it is only checking five items in total." A myth has been created.

    It's not about the intrinsic value of the add-on (I would benchmark if I could and publish however the results would come out), I am just asking for less BS.
     
  18. Alhaitham

    Alhaitham Registered Member

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    My point is that the adblock plus version that was out at the time of writing the description is different from the latest version

    So to actually say that the description is misleading, the older version of the addon on the older version of the browser should be tested
     
  19. Dave0291

    Dave0291 Registered Member

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    Rachet, if things weren't opening up instantly or close to it on that system I'd say your system had an issue. Bluhell doesn't really have anything to do with speed in your case. I actually don't like BluHell at all. I've tried it more than once and was unimpressed by its ad blocking performance. Ongoing soap-boxing by certain people and some heaviness aside, ABP is about as good as you're going to get for overall ad-blocking/pop-up removal. I'm currently using AdGuard on Chrome and, as good as this extension is, even it has issues that ABP sailed right through. If I'm asked for an opinion on ad blockers, I'm only going to recommend AdGuard or ABP. I wouldn't know about any misleading from BluHell because I neither care nor would understand any of the nuts and bolts of it anyway.
     
  20. gorhill

    gorhill Guest

    Look, testing over 20,000 filters against every single net request URL is pure nonsense. That would break the browser. But in any case, here, Adblock Plus code on May 8th 2013:

    https://github.com/adblockplus/adbl...9ca83209b10734125ad7219d5/lib/matcher.js#L373

    Same implementation as today: Tokenize URL, lookup filters which matches tokens, test filters. Result, a hundred or so filters tested per URL, not all of them as suggested in the description of Bluhell.

    Looks like it comes down to some people not minding (even defending) the BS. As for me, I can't stand it, so I call it.
     
  21. Assasin

    Assasin Registered Member

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    It is true that Bluehell Firewall is much lighter than ADP. Furthermore as gorhill says it is based on 7 regexp rules. As a result it misses some ads(example facebook ads, gmail ads).
    Maybe adblock has more options but the truth is there can be a huge list of regexps and custom filters. That would make addons lighter and whitelist would provide user the ability to customize options.
     
  22. Alhaitham

    Alhaitham Registered Member

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    Would leave it here

    The methodology and technical stuff is for the authors to discuss
     
  23. ratchet

    ratchet Registered Member

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    So it's been several days now and I have an update. Literally to this point, there are only two differences I've found between ABP and Bluhell relative to effectiveness and reliability. Of course, a lot depends on where and how you surf. Bluhell will occasionally give a warning if you want to go to a site or not. I'm not sure whether that is a good thing or a bad thing but it does require user input. Secondly, in yahoo mail (no ads ever with gmail as someone suggested) the very first/top field in the inbox has always been some sort of a colored ad. I installed Cyberfox/Firefox extension "Yahoo Mail Hide" and it's gone!
     
  24. Joxx

    Joxx Registered Member

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    it happened to me as well
    I find it strange, it is not supposed to do that

    Capture.PNG
     
  25. Q Section

    Q Section Registered Member

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    After having a bit more time to test this - it was decided to no longer use Bluhell Firewall on a test machine as it allows far too many ads - especially Google ads.
     
    Last edited: Jun 19, 2014
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