10 ms·

How do Chrome extensions impact browser performance?

152 points by fdb 5y ago

awiesenhofer 5y ago
> Regression in Save to Pocket > In last year's tests, Save to Pocket injected one small stylesheet into every page, but this had no noticeable impact on performance. > However, Save to Pocket now always loads a 2 MB JavaScript file, adding 110 milliseconds of CPU time. Probably a good time to start using Pockets bookmarklet: https://help.getpocket.com/article/987-using-the-pocket-bookmarklet https://help.getpocket.com/article/987-using-the-pocket-book...
- WayToDoor 5y ago
  Or just use Firefox, where the button is there by default. Not that I like it, but it's a builtin.
  - gchamonlive 5y ago
    I really like what Firefox represents, but we can't just recommend Firefox when many websites don't work well o Firefox. It might not be firefox's fault and I believe we should not endorse website browser exclusivity, but the fact is that if you have to use teams for instance, it is either the terribly inneficient and bug riddled app or the browser version which only supports calls on chromium based browsers. Maybe you have to use Chrome and you have to use that particular extension.
    - SahAssar 5y ago
      If you are a teams customer please file a ticket to improve cross-browser support. The only way this will change is if their customers actually say something.
      - gchamonlive 5y ago
        I mean, there is nothing in the roadmap: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=Microsoft%20Teams&searchterms=Firefox https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/roadmap?filter... And I already upvoted the support ticket for firefox: https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/36946039-calls-support-in-firefox-mozilla https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su... However, teams was just an example. Just to say that sometimes people can't just use firefox despite their efforts. Trust me I tried for months, and in both the companies I worked, either teams or Palo Alto VPN freak out with firefox. Had to adopt Brave for the working environment. I use firefox for everything else, though.
    - capableweb 5y ago
      I know of Netflix that doesn't support Firefox for some reason (last time I tried) but what other websites don't work in Firefox? I'm using Firefox (+uBlock Origin) as my daily driver and everything seems to work fine for me.
      - SahAssar 5y ago
        Netflix works fine for me in FF, but you will get a prompt to enable EME (DRM) on first visit on linux.
      - plushpuffin 5y ago
        For some reason, Key Bank won't let me login using Firefox unless I spoof my user agent. They claim it's due to security issues with the browser. This is more of an active check though. when I pretend to be Chrome using as different user agent in a container, everything works fine. Also, ADP (timesheets and paycheck system) frequently breaks for Firefox. Sometimes it just won't load any of its forms or grids when I'm using Firefox. I think they only test with Chrome.
        oauea 5y ago
        > Key Bank won't let me login using Firefox unless I spoof my user agent Stop encouraging this behavior and cancel your service, then. > Also, ADP (timesheets and paycheck system) frequently breaks for Firefox. Sometimes it just won't load any of its forms or grids when I'm using Firefox. I think they only test with Chrome. Was the last time you checked like 10 years ago? Haven't seen this happen in quite some time.
        plushpuffin 5y ago
        I'm not going to cancel my banking account and move to a different bank just because they don't want me accessing their website with a particular browser. It's not a big deal to bypass it and it's far more of a hassle to switch. No, ADP was broken for Firefox just a few months ago. My workplace is on the ESR release channel, so maybe it broke for the slightly older ESR version of Firefox?
    - butz 5y ago
      Currently the worst offenders are video chat services using old non-standard WebRTC implementation. But this should be resolved this year with its deprecation and most services hopefully moving to standard WebRTC implementation. As for other non-working websites, you can report those directly to Firefox, that way they might be able to fix those.
mcraiha 5y ago
"Last year, Grammarly was loading a 1.3 MB Grammarly.js file on every page. Now on most websites only a 112 KB Grammarly-check.js script is loaded. Only if, for example, the user focuses on a text area does the extension load the full Grammarly.js file." I have to wonder if this could be somehow avoided...
- jedimastert 5y ago
  Can you expand on this? You make it seem obvious but I'm really not sure what you're referring to.
  - high_byte 5y ago
    it's comparable to website frontend and backend. While there's a single, big instance of the server in the back, there are many clients rendering their small part in the front. Each time you refresh, only the client is reloaded. To reduce loading times, you should have small clients and let the server so the heavy lifting.
- singlow 5y ago
  I avoid it by not installing Grammarly?
- Santosh83 5y ago
  It could've been cached once and used repeatedly if only the Web had not become so hostile that browsers were forced to enforce same-origin...
  - iaml 5y ago
    What makes you think that it's being loaded over the network? It's most likely loading it from fs directly.
    - capableweb 5y ago
      Parsing a blob that huge does impact performance though.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
this has been shared 4 times in the past 2 weeks
- nickphx 5y ago
  Seems to be shilling a commercial version of https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
- hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
  Interestingly I’m a HN addict who reads HN multiple times a day, and this is the first time I’ve seen it.
titzer 5y ago
Wow, look at the chart for how much ad blockers improve webpage performance for The Independent and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. What absolute piles of shit they serve us and expect us to happily suck down for such meager morsels of content! This makes me 100% want them to fail even harder. Journalism hitched itself to a stupid advertising model that serves no one well and the proof couldn't be more stark.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  How do you expect The Independent and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to make money?
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    By providing better journalism than what I can get for free. That starts with the user experience, which is currently quite poor.
    - colinmhayes 5y ago
      No one is willing to pay for local journalism when every site will copy your story as soon as it breaks.
      - smoldesu 5y ago
        Great, that puts it on-par with the status quo.
        colinmhayes 5y ago
        The problem is the free services can't exist without the originators. The originators can't exist without revenue. If the journalists who are actually writing the pieces as opposed to copying them don't get paid the whole thing falls apart.
        5y ago
somehnacct3757 5y ago
So when Google told us manifest v3 needed to throttle ad blockers to improve performance, they were either lying or had no data to back their claim? Shocked!
- zamadatix 5y ago
  All depends what performance metrics you're comparing, there are plenty of data points in this article showing ad blockers slowing down the browser experience, typically on pages that aren't ad-hell. That being said for pages that are ad-hell (typical news sites are a perfect example) an adblocker prevents loading 90% of the site content so is still faster than not. For a page that's 90% not-ad-content it results in a slower experience. The latter gives particularly bad results for ad-blockers in benchmarks. All depends what sites you compare.
ksec 5y ago
>When testing extensions on the Apple homepage we can see that a dark mode extension called Dark Reader spends 25 seconds analyzing and adjusting images so that they better fit into a dark theme. As a result the page loads much more slowly, as we'll see later on. Sums up my experience not only on Dark Reader but a lot of other Dark mode extension. To the point I simply give up and use some specific CSS extensions. ( However I still get a white screen flash and then turn dark with every refresh or page load, wonder if anyone has a solution to that ). The same with Ad Block. I just use NextDNS now and it is so much better.
- neoncontrails 5y ago
  Genuinely curious, is "25 seconds" a typo? The bar graph suggests Dark Mode adds an additional 3000ms, presumably measured in wall clock time, but IIRC extensions are executed in a single thread. So I'm having trouble attributing a difference of that magnitude to, say, total CPU time.
  - ksec 5y ago
    >Genuinely curious, is "25 seconds" a typo? I am not surprised. Dark Reader have to wait for the whole page downloaded before doing all the calculation on a page with lots of animations and other graphics image over features and CSS layout. ( And it is worst if the image has a white background and not transparent ) There are some page that are just problematic. So generally speaking it is not a very good browsing experience.
    - lostmsu 5y ago
      In defense of Dark Reader, you can switch its mode for all or just some sites. There's a mode, where it does not parse existing CSS and just injects its own.
  - mostlystatic 5y ago
    Author here. Not a typo, I just cut off the chart at 3s because otherwise you can't see any useful info about the other extensions.
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
The most interesting takeaway - the overall resource savings good adblockers provide - is buried under the IMO less interesting graphs showing bad extensions: https://www.debugbear.com/blog/chrome-extension-performance-2021#how-do-ad-blockers-and-privacy-tools-affect-browser-performance https://www.debugbear.com/blog/chrome-extension-performance-... > Without ad-blockers per-page CPU time is 17.5 seconds. This is completely insane. Of course it's a small fraction of that with good ad blockers. Back when Firefox Mobile was near-unusably slow, ad blocking made it competitive. Overall, the experience (speed and UX annoyances) were roughly the same in both (the removal of ads making up for the clunky Firefox UI).
catchmeifyoucan 5y ago
I knew it! I'm working on a tool called amna (https://getamna.com https://getamna.com). It manages your Chrome Windows for you as part of tasks. However, it does so by giving you a new profile of Chrome to work with Amna, without any extensions. Kind of like a brand new browser. It's funny because most people who try Amna are like , whoa, how did you make Chrome so fast? They just don't realize that they have all of these unused and bloated extensions slowing them down. And ofc, after logging into Google, it syncs all their extensions and you're back to a crawl.
- Malp 5y ago
  This is hilarious to me, in a really tragic way. It's a shame that this is the status quo for performance for what is probably the most used software type :(
imjustsaying 5y ago
Anyone know what the fastest-loading password manager might be?
- TingPing 5y ago
  The one built into your browser.
  - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
    How do I access that from my phone or in native apps or store encrypted notes?
    - def_true_false 5y ago
      Out of curiosity, how much would you pay for a password manager with decent performance?
      - kiwijamo 5y ago
        Bitwarden is free, so zero? I would be happy to make a recurring small donation though like I do for various projects on GitHub.
        def_true_false 5y ago
        Bitwarden hangs for multiple seconds every time you unlock the vault. It loses state when you click outside of the popup, alt tab, etc. AFAIK it also leaks the list of all your logins (or rather the sites) through their favicon caching server. To turn this off you first have to login (wtf?).
        askvictor 5y ago
        > AFAIK it also leaks the list of all your logins (or rather the sites) through their favicon caching server. To turn this off you first have to login (wtf?). Do you have more info on this?
Barrin92 5y ago
The Dark Reader performance impact is something I have definitely noticed, had to uninstall it, which is a shame because it works very well.
- dzaima 5y ago
  I've set it to off by default (using a whitelist instead of a blacklist), and have some custom dark themes for most sites I use anyway. Sucks to have bright pages every now and then, but it's still really useful.
- def_true_false 5y ago
  Eh, I wouldn't say it works very well if you get a white flash half the time on switching tabs.
crawsome 5y ago
i know dark reader is bad, but I’m glad somebody did the math. this is an excellent write-up
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
The question is, do Chrome extensions require the user to be "logged in" to Chrome . That seems like a significant tradeoff just to control some software. (Does Firefox require login to run extensions?)
_Understated_ 5y ago
I have not heard of many of the ad blockers in this list [0]. However, it was good to see that UBlock Origin is consistently performing better than most of the other "security" extensions. Edit: It appears that this anchor is used more than once on that page so it takes you to the wrong link! This [1] is the image I wanted to link to! [0] - https://www.debugbear.com/blog/chrome-extension-performance-2021/#top-1000-extensions https://www.debugbear.com/blog/chrome-extension-performance-... [1] - https://dbb-dev.imgix.net/blog/2021-chrome-extension-performance/top-1000-toyota-memory.png?auto=format&dpr=2&width=700 https://dbb-dev.imgix.net/blog/2021-chrome-extension-perform...

152 points by fdb 5y ago

> Regression in Save to Pocket > In last year's tests, Save to Pocket injected one small stylesheet into every page, but this had no noticeable impact on performance. > However, Save to Pocket now always loads a 2 MB JavaScript file, adding 110 milliseconds of CPU time. Probably a good time to start using Pockets bookmarklet: https://help.getpocket.com/article/987-using-the-pocket-bookmarklet https://help.getpocket.com/article/987-using-the-pocket-book...

WayToDoor 5y ago
Or just use Firefox, where the button is there by default. Not that I like it, but it's a builtin.
- gchamonlive 5y ago
  I really like what Firefox represents, but we can't just recommend Firefox when many websites don't work well o Firefox. It might not be firefox's fault and I believe we should not endorse website browser exclusivity, but the fact is that if you have to use teams for instance, it is either the terribly inneficient and bug riddled app or the browser version which only supports calls on chromium based browsers. Maybe you have to use Chrome and you have to use that particular extension.
  - SahAssar 5y ago
    If you are a teams customer please file a ticket to improve cross-browser support. The only way this will change is if their customers actually say something.
    - gchamonlive 5y ago
      I mean, there is nothing in the roadmap: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=Microsoft%20Teams&searchterms=Firefox https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/roadmap?filter... And I already upvoted the support ticket for firefox: https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/36946039-calls-support-in-firefox-mozilla https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su... However, teams was just an example. Just to say that sometimes people can't just use firefox despite their efforts. Trust me I tried for months, and in both the companies I worked, either teams or Palo Alto VPN freak out with firefox. Had to adopt Brave for the working environment. I use firefox for everything else, though.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    I know of Netflix that doesn't support Firefox for some reason (last time I tried) but what other websites don't work in Firefox? I'm using Firefox (+uBlock Origin) as my daily driver and everything seems to work fine for me.
    - SahAssar 5y ago
      Netflix works fine for me in FF, but you will get a prompt to enable EME (DRM) on first visit on linux.
    - plushpuffin 5y ago
      For some reason, Key Bank won't let me login using Firefox unless I spoof my user agent. They claim it's due to security issues with the browser. This is more of an active check though. when I pretend to be Chrome using as different user agent in a container, everything works fine. Also, ADP (timesheets and paycheck system) frequently breaks for Firefox. Sometimes it just won't load any of its forms or grids when I'm using Firefox. I think they only test with Chrome.
      - oauea 5y ago
        > Key Bank won't let me login using Firefox unless I spoof my user agent Stop encouraging this behavior and cancel your service, then. > Also, ADP (timesheets and paycheck system) frequently breaks for Firefox. Sometimes it just won't load any of its forms or grids when I'm using Firefox. I think they only test with Chrome. Was the last time you checked like 10 years ago? Haven't seen this happen in quite some time.
        plushpuffin 5y ago
        I'm not going to cancel my banking account and move to a different bank just because they don't want me accessing their website with a particular browser. It's not a big deal to bypass it and it's far more of a hassle to switch. No, ADP was broken for Firefox just a few months ago. My workplace is on the ESR release channel, so maybe it broke for the slightly older ESR version of Firefox?
  - butz 5y ago
    Currently the worst offenders are video chat services using old non-standard WebRTC implementation. But this should be resolved this year with its deprecation and most services hopefully moving to standard WebRTC implementation. As for other non-working websites, you can report those directly to Firefox, that way they might be able to fix those.

mcraiha 5y ago

"Last year, Grammarly was loading a 1.3 MB Grammarly.js file on every page. Now on most websites only a 112 KB Grammarly-check.js script is loaded. Only if, for example, the user focuses on a text area does the extension load the full Grammarly.js file." I have to wonder if this could be somehow avoided...

jedimastert 5y ago
Can you expand on this? You make it seem obvious but I'm really not sure what you're referring to.
- high_byte 5y ago
  it's comparable to website frontend and backend. While there's a single, big instance of the server in the back, there are many clients rendering their small part in the front. Each time you refresh, only the client is reloaded. To reduce loading times, you should have small clients and let the server so the heavy lifting.
singlow 5y ago
I avoid it by not installing Grammarly?
Santosh83 5y ago
It could've been cached once and used repeatedly if only the Web had not become so hostile that browsers were forced to enforce same-origin...
- iaml 5y ago
  What makes you think that it's being loaded over the network? It's most likely loading it from fs directly.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Parsing a blob that huge does impact performance though.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

this has been shared 4 times in the past 2 weeks

nickphx 5y ago
Seems to be shilling a commercial version of https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
Interestingly I’m a HN addict who reads HN multiple times a day, and this is the first time I’ve seen it.

titzer 5y ago

Wow, look at the chart for how much ad blockers improve webpage performance for The Independent and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. What absolute piles of shit they serve us and expect us to happily suck down for such meager morsels of content! This makes me 100% want them to fail even harder. Journalism hitched itself to a stupid advertising model that serves no one well and the proof couldn't be more stark.

colinmhayes 5y ago
How do you expect The Independent and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to make money?
- smoldesu 5y ago
  By providing better journalism than what I can get for free. That starts with the user experience, which is currently quite poor.
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    No one is willing to pay for local journalism when every site will copy your story as soon as it breaks.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      Great, that puts it on-par with the status quo.
      - colinmhayes 5y ago
        The problem is the free services can't exist without the originators. The originators can't exist without revenue. If the journalists who are actually writing the pieces as opposed to copying them don't get paid the whole thing falls apart.
        5y ago

somehnacct3757 5y ago

So when Google told us manifest v3 needed to throttle ad blockers to improve performance, they were either lying or had no data to back their claim? Shocked!

zamadatix 5y ago
All depends what performance metrics you're comparing, there are plenty of data points in this article showing ad blockers slowing down the browser experience, typically on pages that aren't ad-hell. That being said for pages that are ad-hell (typical news sites are a perfect example) an adblocker prevents loading 90% of the site content so is still faster than not. For a page that's 90% not-ad-content it results in a slower experience. The latter gives particularly bad results for ad-blockers in benchmarks. All depends what sites you compare.

ksec 5y ago

>When testing extensions on the Apple homepage we can see that a dark mode extension called Dark Reader spends 25 seconds analyzing and adjusting images so that they better fit into a dark theme. As a result the page loads much more slowly, as we'll see later on. Sums up my experience not only on Dark Reader but a lot of other Dark mode extension. To the point I simply give up and use some specific CSS extensions. ( However I still get a white screen flash and then turn dark with every refresh or page load, wonder if anyone has a solution to that ). The same with Ad Block. I just use NextDNS now and it is so much better.

neoncontrails 5y ago
Genuinely curious, is "25 seconds" a typo? The bar graph suggests Dark Mode adds an additional 3000ms, presumably measured in wall clock time, but IIRC extensions are executed in a single thread. So I'm having trouble attributing a difference of that magnitude to, say, total CPU time.
- ksec 5y ago
  >Genuinely curious, is "25 seconds" a typo? I am not surprised. Dark Reader have to wait for the whole page downloaded before doing all the calculation on a page with lots of animations and other graphics image over features and CSS layout. ( And it is worst if the image has a white background and not transparent ) There are some page that are just problematic. So generally speaking it is not a very good browsing experience.
  - lostmsu 5y ago
    In defense of Dark Reader, you can switch its mode for all or just some sites. There's a mode, where it does not parse existing CSS and just injects its own.
- mostlystatic 5y ago
  Author here. Not a typo, I just cut off the chart at 3s because otherwise you can't see any useful info about the other extensions.

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago

The most interesting takeaway - the overall resource savings good adblockers provide - is buried under the IMO less interesting graphs showing bad extensions: https://www.debugbear.com/blog/chrome-extension-performance-2021#how-do-ad-blockers-and-privacy-tools-affect-browser-performance https://www.debugbear.com/blog/chrome-extension-performance-... > Without ad-blockers per-page CPU time is 17.5 seconds. This is completely insane. Of course it's a small fraction of that with good ad blockers. Back when Firefox Mobile was near-unusably slow, ad blocking made it competitive. Overall, the experience (speed and UX annoyances) were roughly the same in both (the removal of ads making up for the clunky Firefox UI).

catchmeifyoucan 5y ago

I knew it! I'm working on a tool called amna (https://getamna.com https://getamna.com). It manages your Chrome Windows for you as part of tasks. However, it does so by giving you a new profile of Chrome to work with Amna, without any extensions. Kind of like a brand new browser. It's funny because most people who try Amna are like , whoa, how did you make Chrome so fast? They just don't realize that they have all of these unused and bloated extensions slowing them down. And ofc, after logging into Google, it syncs all their extensions and you're back to a crawl.

Malp 5y ago
This is hilarious to me, in a really tragic way. It's a shame that this is the status quo for performance for what is probably the most used software type :(

imjustsaying 5y ago

Anyone know what the fastest-loading password manager might be?

TingPing 5y ago
The one built into your browser.
- weird-eye-issue 5y ago
  How do I access that from my phone or in native apps or store encrypted notes?
  - def_true_false 5y ago
    Out of curiosity, how much would you pay for a password manager with decent performance?
    - kiwijamo 5y ago
      Bitwarden is free, so zero? I would be happy to make a recurring small donation though like I do for various projects on GitHub.
      - def_true_false 5y ago
        Bitwarden hangs for multiple seconds every time you unlock the vault. It loses state when you click outside of the popup, alt tab, etc. AFAIK it also leaks the list of all your logins (or rather the sites) through their favicon caching server. To turn this off you first have to login (wtf?).
        askvictor 5y ago
        > AFAIK it also leaks the list of all your logins (or rather the sites) through their favicon caching server. To turn this off you first have to login (wtf?). Do you have more info on this?

Barrin92 5y ago

The Dark Reader performance impact is something I have definitely noticed, had to uninstall it, which is a shame because it works very well.

dzaima 5y ago
I've set it to off by default (using a whitelist instead of a blacklist), and have some custom dark themes for most sites I use anyway. Sucks to have bright pages every now and then, but it's still really useful.
def_true_false 5y ago
Eh, I wouldn't say it works very well if you get a white flash half the time on switching tabs.

crawsome 5y ago

i know dark reader is bad, but I’m glad somebody did the math. this is an excellent write-up

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

The question is, do Chrome extensions require the user to be "logged in" to Chrome . That seems like a significant tradeoff just to control some software. (Does Firefox require login to run extensions?)

_Understated_ 5y ago

I have not heard of many of the ad blockers in this list [0]. However, it was good to see that UBlock Origin is consistently performing better than most of the other "security" extensions. Edit: It appears that this anchor is used more than once on that page so it takes you to the wrong link! This [1] is the image I wanted to link to! [0] - https://www.debugbear.com/blog/chrome-extension-performance-2021/#top-1000-extensions https://www.debugbear.com/blog/chrome-extension-performance-... [1] - https://dbb-dev.imgix.net/blog/2021-chrome-extension-performance/top-1000-toyota-memory.png?auto=format&dpr=2&width=700 https://dbb-dev.imgix.net/blog/2021-chrome-extension-perform...