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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

#131

Post by tim333 »

sa46 wrote: post #98
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 intere…

I switched to Bitwarden for similar reasons. Seems ok though I haven't checked the latency.

Re: How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance

#132

Post by ptman »

Lex-2008 wrote: post #40
pirsquare wrote: post #26

Great research! I'm a user of evernote web clipper and seeing that they're adding 3mb to every page that I'm using is extremely discouraging. My browse to clip ratio is around 1000:1 and I'm probably removing the extension after this. Just wondering, can browser extensions codesplit their bundles? If it's possible, then it is really disappointing to see these large companies loading huge bundles on initial load.

Did you try to set the extension to "run on click"? Right-click extension icon, "This can read and change site data" -> "When you click the extension". I didn't try it myself (it might require reloading the page), but might be an option for 1000:1 browse to clip ratio.

TIL. Would be wonderful to have this on firefox as well

Re: How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance

#133

Post by Wowfunhappy »

a_imho wrote: post #130
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because a web browser should be fundamentally neutral by default. All content should get rendered the same way, regardless of which server or domain it comes from. That doesn't preclude the browser from making choices to protect privacy and security, but all sites should be treated equally (as Safari does with its tracking protection, for instance).

I don't think I agree with that. Do you want spam treated the same as your regular email for example? It is up to the implementation to decide what is {spy|mal|track|junk}ware. The reverse is also problematic, sites treat browsers (or even user agents) very differently. Why should browsers not do the same?

For email, I agree some sort of spam filtering is necessary—but I wouldn't want an email client to alter the contents of messages depending on who the sender is. (By default at least—customization through plugins is great!)

> Sites treat browsers (or even user agents) very differently. Why should browsers not do the same?

But isn't that exactly why browsers are now phasing out user agents? I'm all for that—I shouldn't have to fake my user agent in order for Slack to work in a mobile browser.

If there's a certain browser feature that a website needs, and the website detects this feature isn't present and changes its behavior accordingly, that's quite different!

Re: How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance

#134

Post by behnamoh »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #63
a_imho wrote: 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…

But even Brave doesn't block some google ads.

Re: How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance

#135

Post by TraceFree »

joshmanders wrote: post #50
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…

Brave Browser is Chrome with that built into it.

When you fire up the Brave browser, it pings Google's servers and starts collecting your data. google doesnt give away multimillion dollar software applications without the ability to capture data with them.

Re: How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance

#136

Post by e40 »

Lex-2008 wrote: post #40
pirsquare wrote: post #26

Great research! I'm a user of evernote web clipper and seeing that they're adding 3mb to every page that I'm using is extremely discouraging. My browse to clip ratio is around 1000:1 and I'm probably removing the extension after this. Just wondering, can browser extensions codesplit their bundles? If it's possible, then it is really disappointing to see these large companies loading huge bundles on initial load.

Did you try to set the extension to "run on click"? Right-click extension icon, "This can read and change site data" -> "When you click the extension". I didn't try it myself (it might require reloading the page), but might be an option for 1000:1 browse to clip ratio.

I just tried it and it doesn't seem to work in Version 83.0.4103.106 (Official Build) (64-bit).

When I clicked on EditThisCookie it said there were no cookies when it was set to "when you click this extension", but when I changed it to "all sites" it showed me cookies.

Too bad.

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