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How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance

debugbear.com

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Re: How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance

#102
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It blocks some tracking, but is it a good content blocker? Last time I checked I still needed to install ublock or equivalent for acceptable performance. How hard it is to incorporate something an extension already provides?

Not hard at all, they could include uBlock add-on by default (as they did with Pocket) except allow people to disable it this time. They do rely on Google's advertising revenue for multiple $100M of funding; so they presumably don't want to be too successful in democratising ad-blocking. Eich used to be a controlling influence on FF (as Mozilla CEO), since he was ousted he heads Brave browser which includes content b…

Not unless they buy uBlock first, which is what they did with Pocket. And unlike Pocket, which was already a company looking to get bought, uBlock is very much not that.

Re: How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Ah that explains it. Thanks!

Re: How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance

#106

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…

> CPU usage is happening after the page has visually finished loading all relevant content

This can be very noticeable though, leading to sluggishness, stuttering scrolling, slowing down other tasks, increasing fan noise on laptops. uBO in my anecdotal experience may almost make a bigger positive impact in this fashion than simply at the initial render.

Re: How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not hard at all, they could include uBlock add-on by default (as they did with Pocket) except allow people to disable it this time. They do rely on Google's advertising revenue for multiple $100M of funding; so they presumably don't want to be too successful in democratising ad-blocking. Eich used to be a controlling influence on FF (as Mozilla CEO), since he was ousted he heads Brave browser which includes content b…

Not unless they buy uBlock first, which is what they did with Pocket. And unlike Pocket, which was already a company looking to get bought, uBlock is very much not that.

Nit: you must be talking about uBlock Origin, because uBlock was actually bought[1].

[1] https://blog.getadblock.com/the-adblock-family-gets-a-new-ad...

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