Scientific papers

2026

• "Users Pay Twice: The Hidden Energy Cost of Web Advertising"
  • https://hal.science/hal-05479340v1/file/Pelissier_etal_WebConf_2026_Users_Pay_Twice.pdf

2025

• "Privacy vs. Profit: The Impact of Google's Manifest Version 3 (MV3) Update on Ad Blocker Effectiveness"
  • https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01000
• "Impact of ad blockers on computer power consumption: a comparative analysis of browser ad on and built-in browsers feature"
  • https://research.library.mun.ca/16818/

2024

• "Ad Blockers & Online Privacy: A Comparative Analysis of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET)"
  • https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=133505

2023

• "Defining “Broken”: User Experiences and Remediation Tactics When Ad-Blocking or Tracking-Protection Tools Break a Website’s User Experience"
  • https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec23fall-prepub-83-nisenoff.pdf
• "Early detection of new web tracking methods across 1.5 million sites"
  • https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4356699
• "Client-side energy and GHGs assessment of advertising and tracking in the news websites"
  • https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jiec.13376 (not freely available)

2022

• "On the Impact of Internal Webpage Selection when Evaluating Ad Blocker Performance"
  • https://www.ida.liu.se/~nikca89/papers/mascots22.pdf
• "Towards Understanding First-Party Cookie Tracking in the Field"
  • https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.01498.pdf

2021

• "A Distributed Performance Measurement Tool for Tor Browser"
  • https://www.esat.kuleuven.be/cosic/publications/thesis-407.pdf
• "Internet Privacy Implications"
  • https://digital.wpi.edu/downloads/h989r614k
• "The CNAME of the Game: Large-scale Analysis of DNS-based Tracking Evasion"
  • https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.09301.pdf

2020

• "Enhancing System Transparency, Trust, and Privacy with Internet Measurement"
  • https://benvds.com/papers/dissertation.pdf
• "Characterizing CNAME Cloaking-Based Tracking on the Web"
  • https://tma.ifip.org/2020/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2020/06/tma2020-camera-paper66.pdf
• "Demystifying content-blockers: A large scale study of actual performance gains"
  • https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.01735.pdf
• "Energy Conservation with Open Source Ad Blockers"
  • https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/technologies/technologies-08-00018/article_deploy/technologies-08-00018.pdf
• "Understanding the Performance Costs and Benefits of Privacy-focused Browser Extensions"
  • https://kevin.borgolte.me/files/pdf/www2020-privacy-extensions.pdf
• "What a Tangled Web We Weave: Understanding the Interconnectedness of the Third Party Cookie Ecosystem"
  • https://nms.kcl.ac.uk/netsys/datasets/tracking-the-trackers-papers/tanged_web.pdf

2019

• "Analyse et comparaison des différents outils permettant de limiter ses traces numériques"
  • https://dial.uclouvain.be/memoire/ucl/object/thesis:19078

2017

• "A comparison of web privacy protection techniques"
  • https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.06850.pdf
• "Ad-blocking: A Study on Performance, Privacy and Counter-measures"
  • https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.03193.pdf
• "Benchmark and Comparison of Tracker-blockers: Should You Trust Them?"
  • https://tma.ifip.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/tma2017_paper30.pdf
• "Block Me If You Can: A Large-Scale Study of Tracker-Blocking Tools"
  • https://publications.sba-research.org/publications/block_me_if_you_can.pdf

2016

• "What Ad Blockers Are (and Are Not) Doing"
  • https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~cew/papers/hotweb16.pdf

Other helpful reference materials

2024

• DebugBear Blog: "How Do Chrome Extensions Impact Website Performance In 2024?"
  • "The Impact of ad blocking on website performance"
• Who is Tracking You? "Effects of Privacy Browser Settings and Plugins On Web-Tracking"

2022

• testachats (Belgium): Le bloqueur de publicité gratuit de Google Chrome ne bloque pratiquement aucune pub
  • Translated excerpt: "If you're looking for a good free adblocker, choose uBlock Origin. This adblocker achieved the best results in terms of effectiveness in blocking advertisements, privacy, functionality and time saving."

2021

• DebugBear Blog: "How do Chrome extensions impact browser performance?"
  • "How do ad blockers and privacy tools affect browser performance?"

2020

• DebugBear Blog: "2020 Chrome Extension Performance Report"
  • "Performance impact of ad blockers"