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Dear Alexei:
Thanks for all of your work on Ghostery, it's a terrific idea and much needed in these times of constant privacy violations by the social media sites. Unfortunately, your fine extension along with Abine's equally excellent "Do Not Track" app tend to slow down my browser dramatically (I use Safari for the Mac 5.1.5.) and introduce various minor erratic behaviors while I'm engaged in heavy surfing on the eBay site. My business involves buying and selling vintage mechanical watches on eBay, so this is a problem that I cannot avoid. Until I can find a work-around, I've been forced to temporarily disable the Ghostery and DNT extensions on all of my browsers. You and your team are doing a wonderful job and performing a real service for the whole online community so let me thank you once again for all your efforts!
(For your troubleshooting files: My primary computer is a MacBook Pro 15.4" [4,1] with an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz Penryn processor with 2GB of RAM, a 256 MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GPU and I'm running OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard. My default browser is Safari for the Mac 5.1.5 and I while I sometimes use FireFox 11.0 for certain sites, the problems with slow page loads and erratic behaviors have only been observed on Safari.)
I look forward to the day when I can re-enable Ghostery.
Lawrence
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I’m
sad
Thanks for your great extension/Sorry I've had to temporarily disable it!
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Hi misterman138,
Thanks for your kind words.
It would be helpful to know what problems exactly you run into on eBay. You could start a new thread describing these issues. This would help improve Ghostery for everybody. -
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You should explain where and when the slowdowns occur in particular, and what you mean by "minor erratic behaviors" so that we could reproduce and see how we could improve.
Also, it's largely redundant to use DNT+ along with Ghostery, and using both taxes your browser twice over. -
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I’m
not sure, really, but I like the face!
Alexei:
Thanks both for the prompt reply as well as the suggestion to stop using both Ghostery & Abine's DNT extension at the same time. You're right, of course, it is redundant and undoubtedly contributes to the slowdowns that I've experienced. I was already considering just going back to Ghostery alone before your email, since your extension allows much more control over the process and also gives the user a finer granularity to that control.
In our online endeavor, it's my brother who handles the actual "research" end of our business (Which involves a mind-numbing amount of eBay searches and a staggering amount of page loads, something way beyond my attention span or my pay grade!). And it was he who experienced the problems first-hand. But he duplicated the issues for me and I'll attempt to explain the problems for you.
When my brother surfs the eBay watch pages he will click on different auctions when he sees an item that interests him, sometimes that will load a seller's eBay store or will lead to a page of watches offered by that same seller. Often these sellers will use Auctiva or other picture servers to deliver their images, just as often it will just be a page for that particular item that he had clicked upon.
Page loading will often lock up at this point if the pictures are very large or there are many of them loading. Sometimes the page will freeze with only the upper or lower half of the graphics displayed and some text will be missing as well. Often the browser bar will show the spinning gear whirling around but nothing will load at all and the page will be just an expanse white space. My brother tells me that sometimes the browser will lock up, show a rainbow SPOD and then quit completely, but he was never able to duplicate that behavior for me.
When my brother stops fixating on the issue and has had some time to forget, I am going to reload Ghostery by itself and experiment a bit. When I do, I'll be sure to let you know how it worked out! Thanks again!
Lawrence from NYC-
Cool, we're in NYC too!
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Hello Lawrence,
Glad to hear you'll give it another shot. I'll note these problems in our issue tracker. A page with a large number of elements (such as images) is indeed currently likely to give Safari trouble.
Until we release further performance improvements for Safari (there is only so much we can do given the tools we have), have you considered switching to Chrome (and Ghostery for Chrome) for your main browser? As far as we know, Ghostery for Chrome does not suffer from any performance issues. -
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I’m
happy to be back on Ghostery!
Hello again, Alexei:
I re-activated the Ghostery extension on Safari a couple of days ago but I've uninstalled Abine's DNT extension, just as I said I would. And so far everything is working out perfectly, no more major slowdowns and no more bizarre behaviors. The only real change I've made to Ghostery is to de-activate the Alert Bubble and that's mainly for my brother's peace of mind. (If he doesn't see the Alert Bubble, he doesn't know that the extension is running. And what he doesn't see running, doesn't distract him!)
Thanks for the suggestion about switching to Chrome, but for some reason I've had nothing but trouble with Chrome on my system. For reasons that I can't quite fathom, the Chrome browser is super buggy on my MacBook Pro and I never use it anymore. I really prefer Safari anyway, so it's really no big deal. I am curious as to why Chrome is so problematic on my system, but that's a story for another forum isn't it?
Thanks for everything,
Lawrence from NYC-
You are welcome! Let us know if there are any other issues.
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CHAMP
