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How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance

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Re: How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance

#91

Post by eyegor »

arprocter wrote: post #75
esperent wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I ran every kind of virus test I could find about a month ago since I was getting weird display/jank issues. Couldn't find anything, and in the end I tracked the issues down to a windows display scaling error. Any idea how I would go about testing for a botnet?

I've seen resetting Chrome fix all sorts of weirdness: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/3296214?hl=en

Resetting chrome isn't much of a solution if the underlying problem is botnet affiliation (trojan, rootkit, etc). Should be reasonably easy to shut down all applications and services, and inspect the traffic going through the router for suspicious domains. If you only have a windows machine connected there should only be Microsoft traffic and maybe the router manufacturer. Anything else, and it's probably malicious.

Re: How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance

#92

Post by hoten »

gorhill wrote: 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…

could you open a bug in https://crbug.com/ and tag the extensions component?

Re: How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance

#94

Post by hoten »

londons_explore wrote: post #83
mostlystatic wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lab analysis is always going to have compromises. What's important is the relative change (without and with the extensions), and that the extra work isn't especially slowed down because of lack of GPU.

Re: How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance

#95

Post by eli »

a_imho wrote: post #12

Most ad blockers work by blocking certain network requests that are initiated by the page. DDG Privacy Essentials reduces the number of network requests by 95% and the download weight by 80%. DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials reduces the CPU time of the article page from 31s to just 1.6s. All other tested extensions also bring CPU time down to at most 10s. It seems the single most important thing regarding Real Word Perf…

Aggressive content blockers also tend to break websites. Not big sites like Washington Post for very long, but all sorts of small sites and in confusing ways.

For example, we had to rearchitect part of our site that was talking about marketing and advertising because various ad blockers decide any url pattern with '/advertising/' shouldn't be loaded.

Re: How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance

#96

Post by lordlimecat »

eyegor wrote: post #91
arprocter wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen resetting Chrome fix all sorts of weirdness: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/3296214?hl=en

Resetting chrome isn't much of a solution if the underlying problem is botnet affiliation (trojan, rootkit, etc). Should be reasonably easy to shut down all applications and services, and inspect the traffic going through the router for suspicious domains. If you only have a windows machine connected there should only be Microsoft traffic and maybe the router manufacturer. Anything else, and it's probably malicious.

Inspecting your PC's traffic from a sniffer on your PC to find a rootkit seems like a fool's errand.

If something has driver / kernel level privileges it can trivially hide such traffic from any sniffer you have running.

Re: How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance

#98

Post by sa46 »

crazygringo wrote: post #53

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 have to use LastPass.

I recently switched from LastPass to 1Password because of the added latency from Lastpass. Lastpass adds about 70ms to first contentful paint on example.com. 1Password, on the other hand, runs after the painting is done so it doesn't block rendering. I polished up a blog draft I had lying around about switching to 1Password: https://joe.schafer.dev/passing-lastpass/

> I'd be much more interested to see how extensions like Evernote or LastPass increase the time it takes for a real webpage (e.g. "nytimes.com") to finish painting the viewport not including ads.

I reinstalled Lastpass to test on nytimes.com. It takes 58ms to evaluate onloadwff.js (the Lastpass entry point) before any content is rendered.

Re: How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance

#99

Post by identity0 »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #93

Can someone give me an ELI5 on Privacy Badger? My current stack is just uBlock Origin, I'm considering layering PB over the top.

In my experience, PB pretty much does nothing. UBO already blocks trackers and social media buttons, and if it doesn’t, you can turn on those filters. PB doesn’t even block the trackers until it “learns” that they are trackers, it just avoids sending cookies (which doesn’t stop facebook from fingerprinting you.) The best method would probably turning off 3rd party scripts and iframes in UBO, but that does mean you have to un-break a lot of sites. An extension like cookie autodelete would also do much more than PB, since, if you have no cookies, they can’t be sent.

Edit: I realized that I sound like I’m bashing PB too much. PB is definitely better than nothing, and doesn’t break any sites, but there are better things you can do which make PB obsolete.

Re: How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance

#100

Post by rurban »

glangdale wrote: post #28

It's entertaining that there is yet another area where "running large numbers of regular expressions, known in advance and not changing all that often" over lots of input is performance critical. This was a key driver behind writing Hyperscan ( https://github.com/intel/hyperscan ) which I used to work on when it was primarily used for network security (thousands or tens of thousands of regular expression rules for fi…

Hyperscan is still dynamic, and C only. Google or Mozilla could use perfect hashes and ship it. (Google won't). You need a native extension for a fast low memory blocker.
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