Hosts file vs. Firewall

For the sake of speeding up webpage loading, I have been tweaking my hosts file. The results are mixed. Some sites which are ad-heavy are far faster, while others seem to stall for a second while the respective blocked domains are loading (e.g. "waiting for statcounter.etc").

It occurred to me that the hosts file sits behind the firewall, so is there a case for transferring the domains listed in the hosts file to the firewall block list and stop the pages before the PC gets a chance to examine them?

adblockplus is way better.

Even if you move the blocking to your firewall the links to the blocked domains will still be contained within the html of the page and will still be looked up as the page is processed.

You really need something that prevents your browser processing those elements of the page content.

If you are using Firefox try using the Adblockplus, Better Privacy and Ghostery plugins - that takes care of any advert content, tracking cookies and "super" cookies (LSO blighters!). Personally I also use NoScript to selectively disable Javascript - but that's more a security consideration.

I use "adblockplus" but believe and accept it does slow thing's down a tad.

If your main objective is speed, then I think using your own DNS resolver and blocking the ad sites with that is the best option.
See http://npr.me.uk/unbound.html

Alternatively try "Acrylic DNS proxy", that can use a standard hosts file and IMO is faster then using the hosts file in windows.
http://mayakron.altervista.org/support/browse.php?pa...

Have you tried "eDexter", that may prevent some lag in web pages which have some content from a hosts file domain.
http://www.pyrenean.com/eDexter

(To all)

Well I had a 307K hosts file, which was the MVPS one plus a couple of dozen other domains I came across. Just for fun I exported Kaspersky's banner blocker list for safe keeping, then appended it with the 307K list and deleted all the hosts file (leaving the default two lines).

Browsing is much, much faster. Strange that when I first created the hosts list browsing was a little delayed (about a half-second more per page, but after a while it became faster. Then when I did a CCleaner cleanup, it got slow again.

Almost as if the hosts file was cached via SuperFetch or something. So browsing is super-fast and the banner blocker is working fine. I suppose the banner blocker is designed to work in a responsive manner, while the hosts file is less so.

Handy link btw:

http://www.numion.com/Stopwatch/index.html

adblockplus doesn't slow down browsing.

Does for me!

Get a better PC / sort your bad config. If anything, it speeds up browsing because it blocks bloated flash ads, etc.

PC and config are both fine thank you.

Clearly not, if you're seeing a performance hit. Chrome is lightning fast.