Live data from Hacker News

How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance

debugbear.com

81–90 of 136 posts

Re: How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you back that statement up. You're saying that Brave inserts spam content in to pages? Do you have examples? Never seen that myself in my time using Brave. FWIW I quite like the BAT and affiliate link model and was made aware of both prior to my install.

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/06/06/the-brave-we...

That's not spam and I personally don't even have an issue with it

Re: How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance

#82
An note regarding the memory usage in Chromium and uBO specifically.

I have observed that even though the memory usage as reported by developer tools under "JavaScript VM instance" stay rather stable in uBO[1] even after a lot of memory churning operations[2], the figure reported in Chromium's Task Manager keeps climbing up after each of these memory churning operation, and forcing garbage collection does not bring the reported usage down in the Task Manager.

There is something happening in Chromium's extension process (and outside the JavaScript VM in which the extension run) which may cause wildly various memory figures for even the same extension depending on how much memory-churning operations have occurred -- I wish Chromium devs would provide technical insights about this.

* * *

[1] Around 8 MB when using default settings/lists.

[2] For instance, repeatedly purging all filter lists and forcing an update.

Re: How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance

#83

All the tests were done on an n2-standard-2 gcp instance... That doesn't have a GPU. Rendering a webpage without a GPU uses a lot of different codepaths and isn't awfully representative of performance with a GPU.

I ran most of the tests on example.com, which is easy to render without having a GPU available. Looking at on-page CPU time for Evernote, 91% is spent just processing JavaScript or HTML. So I expect any benefit of a GPU to be minimal.

But there might also be a performance hit with a GPU... There are various antipatterns like drawing on a canvas and then reading back the pixels repeatedly that perform atrociously with a GPU (due to the latency between the CPU and GPU). Some sites do a lot of that for things like custom font rendering, fingerprinting user hardware, custom data decompression algorithms that use canvas, etc.

Re: How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance

#86
post #29

> "DDG Privacy Essentials does a simple object property lookup based on the request domain, an operation that is practically instantaneous" This sounds interesting. A bit of searching is not providing much enlightenment - anyone care to explain in a bit more detail? Also, if it is so fast, why aren't all the filter add-ons doing it?

Some filter addons perform complex logic trees based on properties other than the hostname(s) being loaded by the browser, and therefore take up more CPU and RAM for more wall-clock seconds to meet the needs of their increased complexity. They end up able to block more content than others, but that comes at a cost — which, as this page notes, can be much higher than anyone expected.

Re: How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance

#87

Utterly fascinating article. The main takeaways seem to be that 1) extensions in general wind up massively increasing CPU time (by 5-20x) when loading "example.com", and 2) ad blockers wind up massively reducing CPU time (by 4-20x) when loading a "WCPO news article". Which makes me happy that I use uBlock (edit: Origin, thanks below), and sad that I have to use LastPass. HOWEVER -- I feel like both these metrics are…

I was surprised by the choice of WCPO, which to me is a local news station who owns WCPO.com. Does it mean something else I'm not aware of or are they famous for being slow?

Re: How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance

#88
post #82

An note regarding the memory usage in Chromium and uBO specifically. I have observed that even though the memory usage as reported by developer tools under "JavaScript VM instance" stay rather stable in uBO[1] even after a lot of memory churning operations[2], the figure reported in Chromium's Task Manager keeps climbing up after each of these memory churning operation, and forcing garbage collection does not bring t…

I just want to say thank you so much for uBO

Re: How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance

#89

Utterly fascinating article. The main takeaways seem to be that 1) extensions in general wind up massively increasing CPU time (by 5-20x) when loading "example.com", and 2) ad blockers wind up massively reducing CPU time (by 4-20x) when loading a "WCPO news article". Which makes me happy that I use uBlock (edit: Origin, thanks below), and sad that I have to use LastPass. HOWEVER -- I feel like both these metrics are…

I was surprised by the choice of WCPO, which to me is a local news station who owns WCPO.com. Does it mean something else I'm not aware of or are they famous for being slow?

Local news sites tend to be extremely slow and ad-heavy in my experience. So I thought of a medium-sized US city, searched for "Cincinnati news" and picked the top result.

I found what I was looking for, this is the article I ran the tests on: https://www.wcpo.com/news/education/higher-education/miami-u...

Post reply on HN