monline

Don't take me wrong: I'm all for Ghostery. It's a really great initiative and the functionality seems to be OK. The only problem is with performance.

For some time now I've observed some slowdown in page rendering (I use Firefox). I didn't connect it to Ghostery at first and it was not that bad all the time. However the TV guide I used to read got painfully slow. Today I got fed up with it and started hunting down the cause. I disabled my extensions (using binary search) and found that Ghostery was the reason for the slow page rendering. With that in mind I started playing with Ghostery's options: first I've disabled all 3rd-party element blocks and cookie blocks, but it didn't help much. Next I've disabled all the performance options on the Advanced tab, one by one. This didn't do the trick either. As a last resort, I've added all the domains (that the TV guide loaded content from) to the whitelist of Ghostery. This didn't help either. With all Ghostery options set to provide the fastest performance, my TV guide page still loaded twice as slow as without Ghostery.

My machine is a 2006 MacBook Pro with a 2.33 GHz Core2Duo processor. I guess that on faster/newer PCs/Macs/etc. the overhead of Ghostery might not be so obvious. As for me: I've decided to remove it. Some pages load two or three times slower than without it and it's simply not worth the extra privacy.

P.S.: I've lots of extensions installed, but careful elimination proved that Ghostery was the only one that caused the significant slowdown. I tested with v2.7.1, so recent versions might have fixed the issues I was faced with.