Thanks to our awesome GhostRank Panel volunteers, we can (as most of you know) monitor the internet and most of the 3rd party content on it. Out of the nearly 800 companies we watch, we pegged these guys as the ones that lag your browsing experience the most if you live in the USA. To this extent, we’ve dubbed them “Lagtags.” Yes, they’re not all tags – many of them are analytics scripts or widgets – but it just seems to fit. On to the analysis:
Some points of interest:
- Avalanchers’ load time exceeded its next closest competitor, Adfunky, by a whopping 1,300 milliseconds.
- If you were to load all of these elements on one page, in succession, they would add about 22 more seconds to the page’s load time. Think about that.
- From a transparency standpoint, most of these companies don’t disclose how long they retain the data they collect or who they share it with.
Here’s a list of the actual times, with links to our company profiles:
Avalanchers: 3912.721751
Adfunky: 2600.142857
2leep: 2305.563533
ShareASale: 2090.703573
Brand Affinity: 1917.470961
Adfusion: 1908.145773
Wahoha: 1853.056856
GoDaddy Site Analytics: 1793.0625
Redux Media: 1663.106572
Kitara Media: 1578.838889
CORRECTION: You’d think with all this latency, we would have had time to triple-check our data. However, in a previous version of this post, we confused Adfunky and Millennial Media in the graph. This has been corrected, and our apologies go out to Millennial.
Methodology
Ghostery implements Firefox Content Policy XPCOM filter (http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla1.9.1/source/content/base/public/nsIContentPolicy.idl). As such, the content policy filter contains a method that all network events are routed through: shouldLoad. In addition to serving as the block point for Ghostery, we use it to mark every network element that Ghostery is interested in with a startTime user added data component and a unload event that inserts endTime for the same element. Here is the relevant piece of code:
addRequestTime: function(contentType, node) {
if (!node) return;
try {
if ( ( node instanceof Ci.nsIDOMNode ) &&
( (contentType == Ci.nsIContentPolicy.TYPE_SCRIPT) ||
(contentType == Ci.nsIContentPolicy.TYPE_OBJECT) ||
(contentType == Ci.nsIContentPolicy.TYPE_OBJECT_SUBREQUEST) ||
(contentType == Ci.nsIContentPolicy.TYPE_IMAGE) ||
(contentType == Ci.nsIContentPolicy.TYPE_SUBDOCUMENT) ) ) {
node.setUserData(‘ghosteryRequestStartTime’, (new Date()).getTime(), null);
node.addEventListener(“load”, function() {
node.setUserData(‘ghosteryRequestEndTime’, (new Date()).getTime(), null);
}, true);
}
} catch (e) {}
},
This is done to every element passing through Ghostery component. In Ghostery overlay (the stuff that goes on top of Firefox), Ghostery then checks every page to see if there are Ghostery elements. If there are, and GhostRank is enabled, the elements are reported to our census server. Every 1/100 requests will also submit latency data. Here is the calculation for it:
analyzeLatency: function(el, bugId) {
var s = el.getUserData(‘ghosteryRequestStartTime’),
e = el.getUserData(‘ghosteryRequestEndTime’),
t = e – s;
if (t > 0) {
ghostery.recordLatency(bugId, t);
}
},
Stay tuned for our next post: Biggest Lagger: The Top Ten Elements that Slow Your Web Internet Down (Non-US)
[...] the browser plugin that allows its users to “track the trackers,” just released data on the tags, widgets and analytics on websites that are the worst in terms of slo…. Any webmaster worth his or her salt already knows that slow page loads adversely affect Google [...]
[...] the browser plugin that allows its users to “track the trackers,” just released data on the tags, widgets and analytics on websites that are the worst in terms of slo…. Any webmaster worth his or her salt already knows that slow page loads adversely affect google [...]
Honestly surprised Adsense/Facebook are included.
Where does Google Analytics stand?
[...] information regarding the top ten “elements” that slow your website down.We all add them, the “Google Analytics” and ad network tags to our sites. Anytime you [...]
[...] A análise completa está disponível aqui. [...]
[...] Ghostery’s blog, The Purple Box, lists 10 tags that if used collectively on one Web page in succession, would slow down page loading by a whopping 22 seconds. [...]
[...] to a report (via Technology Review) from the makers of browser plug-in, Ghostery, one of the main causes of [...]
[...] Ghostery’s blog, The Purple Box, lists 10 tags that if used collectively on one Web page in succession, would delayed down page loading by a whopping 22 seconds. [...]
[...] Ghostery’s blog, The Purple Box, lists 10 tags that if used collectively on one Web page in succession, would slow down page loading by a whopping 22 seconds. [...]
[...] el blog de Ghostery, The Purple Box, aparecen las 10 etiquetas que, de usarse en conjunto en una página web, podrían llegar a [...]
[...] to a report (via Technology Review) from the makers of browser plug-in, Ghostery, one of the main causes of [...]
Wonderful idea. I’d really like to see the top 50 offenders.
[...] Ghostery’s blog, The Purple Box, lists 10 tags that if used collectively on one Web page in succession, would slow down page loading by a whopping 22 seconds. [...]
[...] Kahl Product Manager at Evidon, Ghostery’s parent company, to talk about their recent study: Biggest Lagger: The Top Ten Elements that Slow Your Internet Down (US), in which they tracked their GhostRank Panel volunteers to monitor the Internet and most [...]
The idea then was that Mozilla makes the browser as light as possible and if users wanted more functionality they would download add ons.
Do you feel that Syria spying on dissidents?