On the Impact of Internal Webpage Selection when Evaluating Ad Blocker Performance
2022 (English)In: 2022 30TH INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON MODELING, ANALYSIS, AND SIMULATION OF COMPUTER AND TELECOMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, MASCOTS, IEEE COMPUTER SOC , 2022, p. 41-48Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
Not all ad blockers achieve the same blocking success and, depending on their implementation, they can either improve or hurt the web performance experienced by users. Borgolte and Feamster (2020) recently provided the first extensive evaluation of how privacy-focused browser extensions affect a users web performance. However, while their work provides a nice comparison of the performance impact that different extensions may have, their evaluation only considered landing pages of a single set of websites. In this paper, we focus specifically on performance comparisons when considering different sets of webpages. For example, we study the impact of whether a page is a landing page or an internal page, whether a page is popular or less popular, as well as the impact of in which country/region the company registering the website is operating (used as a proxy for the primary target market). For our evaluations, we use pairs of webpages carefully selected from the recently proposed Hispar list (Aqeel et al. 2020) and compare the performance of the most popular blocking extensions (Adblock Plus, uBlock Origin, Ghostery, and Private Badger) considered by Borgolte and Feamster with a baseline case in which we do not use any extension. While we observe clear differences in the distribution statistics of the metrics considered, several observations were consistent across all dimensions, including whether we consider landing pages or internal pages. The paper highlights some of these invariants and discusses their implications. In addition, our measurements (and the differences observed by different adblockers) also reveal new insights into how internal vs. landing pages of different webpage categories (e.g., based on popularity or region) differ in their composition and resource usage.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
IEEE COMPUTER SOC , 2022. p. 41-48
Series
International Symposium on Modeling Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems Proceedings, ISSN 1526-7539, E-ISSN 2375-0227
Keywords [en]
Ad blockers; Internal pages; Performance
National Category
Telecommunications
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-194213DOI: 10.1109/MASCOTS56607.2022.00014ISI: 000975089300006ISBN: 9781665455800 (electronic)ISBN: 9781665455817 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:liu-194213DiVA, id: diva2:1761398
Conference
30th International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS), Nice, FRANCE, oct 18-20, 2022
2023-06-012023-06-012023-06-01