HellBoy Firewall: a light adblocker for Firefox

One of the first extensions installed in any browser, is adblocker. We all know AdBlock and its beneficial effect on the appearance of pages viewed. However, there is a negative side to this remarkable expansion. Too much consumption of system resources may significantly slow down the browser and start a job, especially on slower machines.

New solution for ad blocking called HellBoy Firewall weighs only 30 KB of memory and takes about the same amount, as opposed to the multi-megabyte AdBlock. It remains only to find out how it copes with its main task - blocking advertising.

The system works like extensions based roughly on the same principle. Blocker checks downloads page elements for compliance with a special list of rules and, if such an element is included in the "black list", then it is blocked. AdBlock for there are many such lists, which contain rules on all possible and impossible occasions. Therefore, there is such an appetite for system resources, but great reliability.

Expansion creator HellBoy Firewall solved the problem radically, and left in his blocker only five (5!) of the rules, but describing, he said, up to 80% available in the network. Such minimalism explains the tiny size of the expansion and high speed operation.

We have such an approach is a downside. Expanding HellBoy Firewall does not have any settings, it has no interface and no additional functions with which it was possible to create a filter for catching missed advertising. All that we can do - is to enable or disable HellBoy Firewall using the toolbar buttons.

The effectiveness of the work of expansion broadly in line with the assessment of the author. On some sites, advertising is not visible at all, on the other - half way through the defense, so that the overall rate of 80% is quite close to reality. Therefore, if you have a fairly powerful system and enough memory, it make sense to use HellBoy Firewall, probably not. But on slower machines can be very trying. And it should definitely use this extension Firefox users a mobile version for Android, which will help it to deal with advertising without spending scarce resources smartphone or tablet.