Web Browser Grand Prix 273
An anonymous reader writes "After seeing Opera's claim to 'Fastest Browser on Earth' after their most recent release, Tom's Hardware put Apple Safari 4.04, Google Chrome 4.0, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla Firefox 3.6, and Opera 10.50 through a gauntlet of speed tests and time trials to find out which Web browser is truly the fastest. How does your favorite land in the rankings?"
Slashdotted (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Link (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Link (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of these speed tests always compare javascript performance, which I have to say matters less for me on a day to day usage than other things.
At the end of the article (10 pages later), they do break it out into categories. The winner of the 'page load' category is: Firefox.
I care about other things as well, startup times for example (won by Opera), but if I had to pick one most important category for me, it's page load times. YMMV, obviously.
Shortcut to summary: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-chrome-opera,2558-10.html [tomshardware.com]
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I care about other things as well, startup times for example (won by Opera), but if I had to pick one most important category for me, it's page load times. YMMV, obviously.
I care about security and safety, so I just avoid IE. I care about privacy so I avoid Chrome. I care about bloatness so I avoid Opera. I care about functionality so I choose Firefox. I think it's the lesser of all evils. Correct me if I am wrong.
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Re:Link (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't bloat if they are features you want. It is only bloat when they are features somebody else wanted.
Re:Link (Score:5, Insightful)
As you said, YMMV, but I would say that JavaScript execution time is pretty much every bit as important as page load unless you have limited your web browsing to pages created back in the '90s.
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very frankly, as long as its in the same ballpark, speed don't matter.
I find Tom's article ridiculous, for at least 2 reasons:
1- they focus on performance, and disregard features completely. That's their choice, but it's an idiotic one
2- they compare perfs in wildly different configs: a fully usable Opera (with its integrated mouse gestures, adblock, noscript, synch...) vs a unusable barebones Firebox with 0 addons.
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And the conclusions:
Category / Test: Overall Winner
Startup Times: Opera
Memory Usage: Firefox
Page Load Times: Firefox
HTML: Safari
CSS: Safari
Tables: Safari
JavaScript: Chrome
PeaceKeeper: Opera
Acid3: Chrome
DOM: Chrome
Flash: Opera
Java: Opera
SilverLight: Firefox / Internet Explorer
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Memory Usage Recount.
He just did static 'load page look at memory usage' tests. Which is fine. If you only load 10 tabs of pages and never visit anything else.
Firefox constantly eats memory on my MacBook. If I have both Firefox and Photoshop open, Firefox consistently eats more memory than Photoshop. Things will grind to a halt until I kill Firefox.
It was enough to get me to jump ship to Chromium, where aside from the occasional Flash Plug-crash, doesn't require being reset every hour.
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My own testing of Firefox doesn't ever show the massive memory leaks often claimed.
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how many add-ons were you running with Firefox?
how many are you running with Chromium?
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How come addons are a defense for Firefox eating a lot of memory? Does anyone run Firefox with no addons? Everyone always uses addons as the reason why they love Firefox so much, so why shouldn't addons be included in benchmarks? Every benchmark of Firefox should include the 3 most popular addons installed and running. Currently, that looks like Adblock Plus, Video DownloadHelper, and Personas Plus.
Real-world usage of Firefox includes addons, so should benchmarks. A benchmark of Firefox with no addons
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Not to mention, the lack of some of these addons (no xmarks bookmark sync, flashblock barely works) actually keep me from using Chrome.
I just gave it another whirl, and on my machine it is a bit faster... but I'd have to port all my passwords by hand. Between 7 machines.
No thanks.
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How come addons are a defense for Firefox eating a lot of memory?
Unless Chrome, Opera, Safari, etc. have a similar function built in, you aren't comparing apples to apples otherwise. If you start including addons, it would be possibly for a biased tester (MS perhaps? Google? Apple?) to pit FF with the most heavy-weight addons (s)he can find against another browser in a minimalist configuration. It might be reasonable to consider the memory usage, page load times, etc., for each of the browsers in a "typical" configuration, but then you have to decide what
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Re:Link (Score:4, Interesting)
Firefox has an intentional feature where they keep fully rendered pages in memory so they can reload faster when you hit back. They also keep full tab sessions in memory after you close tabs. You can turn these features off if you don't like them.
That being said, I leave Firefox open for days, if not weeks. I run tons of tabs, Greasemonkey scripts, extensions, etc. I haven't seen memory leaks since the Firefox 2.0 days.
I keep considered switching to Chrome, but Greasemonkey scripts still don't work properly, and I can't stop ads from loading. (Chrome adblock solutions render the ad even there is malicious code, but hides it from showing)
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The memory comparison tests were flawed enough to keep me from taking any of their results seriously. While there was very little mention of how memory usage was determined, what little there was indicated that he used the task manager and, for Chrome, added up the totals for each Chrome process.
This is a well covered mistake that has been pointed out since the first tests that showed Chrome being a memory hog. And while I won't get into it, the simplistic method the review seemed to use shows a complete an
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That link is right smack in the submission!
This must be the most redundant post in Slashdot history, and yet it got modded up.
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It was added. The /. editors occasionally do edit.
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Embarrassing.
Of course ... (Score:2)
I'm sure the loading times of all browsers would be faster if the "article" wasn't spread over 11 damn pages ...
Perhaps they could run comparative tests on ad-blocked and flash-blocked vs vanilla spam versions ?
And am I the only one who finds it fucking cynical in the extreme, to force you to surrender your email address just so you can use the printable version and skip the advertising crud ?
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And am I the only one who finds it fucking cynical in the extreme, to force you to surrender your email address just so you can use the printable version and skip the advertising crud ?
They only want to provide such a feature to members of the site. What's cynical about that?
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Because I am worth more than the 0.001 cents they will get for selling my email to spammers ?
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Because I am worth more than the 0.001 cents they will get for selling my email to spammers ?
Since when did they ever do such a thing? Secondly, even if they did what is cynical about that?
Oblig. Princess Bride quote (Score:2)
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I do not think it means, what you think it means.
I do not think that comma, belongs where you put that comma.
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I stand corrected, there is apparently a mod here who doesn't know what it means either and thought me deserving of an overrated moderation (the most overrated of moderations...). I'll clear this up:
Tom's Hardware isn't being cynical, he is being cynical. This isn't just a minor usage error, he got it completely in reverse.
But...but... (Score:2, Funny)
"After seeing Opera's claim to 'Fastest Browser on Earth' after their most recent release, Tom's Hardware put Apple Safari 4.04, Google Chrome 4.0, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla Firefox 3.6, and Opera 10.50 through a gauntlet of speed tests and time trials to find out which Web browser is truly the fastest. How does your favorite land in the rankings?"
I use Lynx you insensitive clod!
You newbie (Score:5, Funny)
Lynx is for newbies. Real men telnet to port 80 and type in the HTTP headers manually, then parse the response in their minds.
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They took telnet out of 64-bit versions of Windows. :(
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But there are 64-bit builds of Putty.
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2) putty will do telnet.
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Why is there a 'then'. It should be done instantly, else you ain't a real one!
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The response is irrelevant.
Thats an awfully obscure way of saying "who reads the articles"! :)
Re:You newbie (Score:4, Funny)
Mere child's play. Real men telnet on port 443.
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You just, but RMS apparently does something similar to this. We fires up page requests from the command line, and has the results return in a mail client as pure text.
Chrome = teh winnar! (Score:2)
analysis and conclusions [tomshardware.com]
I just installed Opera 10.5 and it's decently good enough for me to continue using it .
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Although Firefox somehow wins the "Page Load Times" category, which seems more important to me than javascript benchmark speed.
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I would love to see these tests done with only independent benchmarks.
Re:Chrome = teh winnar! (Score:5, Informative)
And one of them was Apple's, another was Mozilla's and another was an independent 3rd party's test suite.
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Another one was Mozilla's, and on that test Firefox got its ass handed to it by Opera (and Chrome/Safari, by a smaller margin). It's not Toms Hardware's fault if the people interested enough in Javascript performance to write a benchmark are usually interested in Javascript performance because they write Javascript engines.
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Google's suite is great for comparing Firefox, Opera, Explorer, and Safari.
Mozilla's suite is great for comparing Chrome, Opera, Explorer, and Safari.
Apple's suite is great for comparing F
Re:So? (Score:2, Insightful)
Only one browser in the list has adblock/noscript/flashblock.
Without those the other browsers are automatically losers no matter how fast they start up.
Re:So? (Score:4, Insightful)
You are misinformed, I presume you are refering to Firefox, however Chrome and IE both have extensions to do roughly the same thing.
Just because you aren't aware of things outside your viewport of the universe doesn't mean they don't exist.
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For very rough values of “roughly the same”.
IE and Facebook... (Score:2)
For whatever reason, Microsoft's browser loads the Facebook homepage with extreme haste. Firefox, Chrome, and Opera take second, third, and fourth (respectively). Safari takes almost twice as long as the second-place finisher Firefox, and more than four times as long as IE.
Probably because Facebook cuts out a lot of the functionality that IE wouldn’t support anyway?
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is Safari startup time really surprising? (Score:5, Informative)
Besides the obligatory browser code, Safari on Windows uses a lot of libraries that only get used by Safari - CoreFoundation, CoreGraphics, CFNetwork, the Objective-C runtime, and its own GUI (a limited Win32 port of Cocoa?). It also uses libraries that could be shared and/or duplicate builtin Windows functionality - such as sqlite3, zlib, libxml2, libxslt, and pthreads. (I imagine it uses its own SSL implementation too.)
The IE startup time seems higher than it should, because it uses the most Win32 functionality. It uses threading, SSL, XML, etc. from Win32.
Favorite Browser (Score:2, Insightful)
How does your favorite land in the rankings?
If it's your favorite browser, what does it matter how fast it is?
Page load times... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Page load times... (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder how reliable the JS script they've used to determine when page has finished loading really is. Could it be that browsers that report higher scores in the test are simply more truthful about what they finished loading? (e.g. do all of them correctly account for plugins?).
There's one other thing. Historically, the usual trick employed by browsers is to delay rendering the page until it is partially loaded, so as to not constantly re-render. This speeds up the overall page load, but starting to render faster may well show the important parts of the page (those that user cares about) earlier, and if the renderer is fast enough, re-rendering the page repeatedly as it is being downloaded may look "smoother" from user's perspective, and be more usable.
I know that this setting is configurable for Opera, though I don't recall what the default one is. I think it's also configurable for Firefox. IE always has a pretty significant delay there, and I believe it's hardcoded. No idea about Chrome & Safari. Anyway, my point is that, if this setting varies by default, timing of complete page loads can give quite differing results which are not reflective of actual user experience.
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Also regarding memory usage... Opera has configurable memory cache setting. I've just checked what mine is - I don't recall changing it after installing 10.50 - and it's 200Mb. Looking at the tests they've done, none of them loaded enough tabs to fill that, so it is reasonable to assume that Opera just felt free to cache everything on loaded pages, and not clear the cache, since the limit isn't exceeded.
I wonder how the same test would go if they opened, say, 30 tabs...
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Page load time is important, but dwarfed by network latency and speed in non-pathological cases, so I'd actually guess it's among the least important for end-users. Also, while there was a 20% difference between fastest and slowest, that's only about 1/26th of a second so it's approaching
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Startup time is the most visible, and essential for when you want to quickly check a single website (e.g. googling something really quick).
Funny... for me, startup time is the least visible, and not essential for when I want to quickly check a single website (because it’s almost always already running).
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Somewhat true, but I find firefoxe's memory usage and startup time to be really irritating. That and it's gotten cluttered. Chrome's sleekness was the first big reason I switched over. Only the URL bar and bookmark bar take up screen space. The rest of it is dynamially hidden (status bar) or compartimentalized (the settings and configure menus) into smaller areas so as to not take up as much space.
Page loading is well and good, but when it comes down to it, browser's physical size, resource footprint and startup time are more noticible to me.
Firefox won the memory usage title in TFA, too. Also, I find that a properly customized Firefox has one of the smallest browser UIs. There's a title bar, then a single bar that includes all menus, shortcut icons, bookmarks, URL, and a search bar (and it's not cluttered if you've got at least 1280 pixels of width), and then either a list of tabs or a web page.
What I'd really like to see is a scrolling benchmark. If I have a page with a bunch of Slashdot comments and I want to scroll through it at a given
Functionality More Important Than Speed (Score:4, Insightful)
Firefox (Score:2)
As always, Firefox ate much less memory than competitors [tomshardware.com]...specially against opera & chrome.
Performance I care about is hard to measure (Score:4, Insightful)
I care about things like responsiveness. How long does it take to redisplay after switching tabs or adjusting zoom? Is the UI still responsive when another tab/window is busy? Are scrolling and window resizing smooth? Will the browser respond well if the internet connection is lost / the system wakes up from sleep, when using AJAX applications like Gmail/Google Reader? (I had problems with one browser behaving badly with Gmail/Google Reader if the pages were open before entering sleep mode.) Will the browser perform well over RDP, VNC, or NX?
Start-up time isn't very significant - I generally leave browsers running all the time. Memory usage isn't very significant unless the system is low on memory. Otherwise, I prefer that the browser uses as much memory as it can to cache things. Rendering/script delays are not noticeable on modern systems.
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I care about things like responsiveness. How long does it take to redisplay after switching tabs or adjusting zoom? Is the UI still responsive when another tab/window is busy?
Speaking of responsiveness, one neat thing about Opera 10.50 - all tab-specific dialogs are modal to the tab, not to the entire browser window. This means that, if a tab loading in background displays a JS alert, it doesn't suddenly pop up in your face requiring immediate attention - instead, the tab will get a marker indicating that something changed - and you can freely switch back and forth between tabs without closing the dialog first.
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I really, really want a Firefox addon to do this. JS alert-bombs could kiss my ass.
At least per-tab processes, if Firefox would ever implement them, could be killed to shut down a particular tab without killing the entire browser.
Speed and little more (Score:2)
The main debatable test was
Interesting... IE sucks... except when it counts. (Score:2)
IE did best or near best in the web browsing events most users will care about - page load time sfor popular sites like yahoo, facebook, or youtube.
So how does a web browser that apparently sucks at so many theoretical benchmarks, crush the competition in real world load times? Apparently it doesn't matter what you do, if major websites tailor themselves to you.
can someone tell me why (Score:2)
google ripped off simon for its chrome icon?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_(game) [wikipedia.org]
whenever i see that chrome icon, i want to start pressing the panels before i forget the sequence
How much of all these numbers are practical ? (Score:2)
Anything but IE, and you got quality (Score:2)
Really, all the other browsers are good.
Rough comparison:
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won't switch to Chrome yet (Score:2)
I'm addicted to mouse gestures for all my surfing. I switched to Opera way back when, solely for the gestures, and liked it so much I even sent them $20 (paying for a browser!). I switched to Firefox when I learned about the 'All-in-One Gestures' add on.
I'd really like to switch to Chrome, but simply cannot until I find a way to deal with my deep se
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Keyboard shortcuts are far more useful and easy than mouse gestures, IMHO.
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I don't like keyboard work when casual surfing because I usually end up sitting way back from the keyboard and have a cuppa coffee in my hand.
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I was in the same boat, just found smooth gestures [google.com] - it works quite well, though I also had to install smooth gestures new tab [google.com] because otherwise it doesn't work on the "new" tab that shows thumbnails etc.
I've started using Chrome on my laptop now, mostly because Firefox inexplicably started taking up many hundreds of megs of RAM and becoming very slow after a day or two, to the point I had to restart. I have some extensions installed (firebug, firecookie, web developer, gestures) but nothing that I don't ha
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I’ve actually encountered an unpleasant website that screwed up Firefox permanently. By “unpleasant”, I mean spawning hundreds of new tabs, frozen-browser, rickroll/GNAA-style unpleasant. By “screwed up”, I mean that afterward, every 5 seconds Firefox pegged the CPU at 100% for a second. By “permanently”, I mean the abnormal CPU activity occurred whenever Firefox was running even after restarting both Firefox and the entire computer.
A complete uninstall and reinstal
Conclusion (Score:2)
On the whole, there's really a single practical conclusion from those tests that is useful to a user:
Any browser is fast enough, so long as it's not IE.
The winner, hands down, is ... (Score:3, Funny)
... wget.
Real geeks read straight html.
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Pshaw. I telnet to port 80. You and your fancy wget!
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Bah, I lick the ethernet jack to read high and low voltages, and rub wool on my head to set them. You and your fancy telnet!
Chrome memory usage (Score:4, Informative)
Once again, calculating Chrome's memory usage is not as simple as summing the memory usage of all its processes, because shared libraries are only loaded once. It's unclear as to whether these benchmarks took this into account. More info here [chromium.org].
Paranoia (Score:2, Interesting)
WTF?! (Score:2)
I can't help to find the testing biased. With lovely tidbits like...
"After reviewing the JavaScript benchmarks, we've decided that Tom's has no choice but to run all of them in the future. While I personally lean toward JSBenchmark, since it isn't affiliated with any browser, its results don't reflect the outcome in Dromaeo. Until the reason for Opera's devastating Mozilla score can be explained, I believe we'll have to run all of them to get the clearest picture. If you disagree, or have an opinion on a be
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After reviewing the JavaScript benchmarks, we've decided that Tom's has no choice but to run all of them in the future. While I personally lean toward JSBenchmark, since it isn't affiliated with any browser, its results don't reflect the outcome in Dromaeo. Until the reason for Opera's devastating Mozilla score can be explained, I believe we'll have to run all of them to get the clearest picture.
What’s biased about that?!
If all (or several) of the Javascript benchmarks gave almost exactly the same results, they’d have been able to whittle down the list of benchmarks to test. Since there was a wide variation between the different results for the different benchmarks, they decided to keep all of the benchmarks for future testing, at least until we know why the different tests give different results. That makes perfectly good sense.
Or the conclusions, where out out of 13 categories, Safari won 3, Opera 4, Chrome 3, Firefox 3 and IE only one (shared with FF). Yet, they proclaimed Chrome as the winner. Lovely.
Maybe you should have read the very next paragraph under t
Re:A link to the article would be nice. (Score:4, Insightful)
The link [tomshardware.com] was in the original submission. ScuttleMonkey apparently is too much of an idiot to remember to have copied that along when posting.
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It's not like we read the article anyway. I came here looking for the summary posting saying which browser Tom declared the current winner. I must not have read far enough down because it wasn't in the First Post (or the second - aka the first REAL post)......
Re:A link to the article would be nice. (Score:5, Informative)
Google Chrome comes out on top and the writer seems to make a good case for it.
The most interesting conclusions seem to be:
-Firefox is the most memory efficient with multiple tabs (!)
-Opera uses a lot of memory
-No browser really has a performance advantage across multiple sites (for example Facebook is really optimized for IE for some reason)
-Even professional writers don't know how to use the word "faze"
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And netcat > /dev/null wins over even that, but for some strange reason people are interested in browsers that have more than the bare minimum of standards support.
If you want a fast web browser... (Score:3, Insightful)
...block all ads with Privoxy and shut off Javacrap.
Re:If you want a fast web browser... (Score:5, Insightful)
...block all ads with Privoxy and shut off Javacrap.
And then browse with blazing speed ... the 3 web sites that remain partially functional without Javastuff, that is.
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Well, except for Internet Explorer.
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Even Internet Explorer.
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If you pay for a subscription perhaps you can turn off the ads ... otherwise you are getting the article in exchange for viewing ads.
You of course have the option to not view the ads or click continue in exchange they have the option to not deliver it to you. Simple really, but thanks for making sure everyone knows how you feel, its very important that we continue to get this worthless contributions to the discussion, slashdot could not exist as we know it without them.
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I didn’t read any of the ads, until I was reading the comments and finally decided to load it once with adblock turned off to find out why people were complaining about Tom’s taking forever to load.