How do Chrome extensions impact browser performance?

Wow, look at the chart for how much ad blockers <i>improve</i> 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&#x27;t be more stark.

I knew it!<p>I&#x27;m working on a tool called amna (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getamna.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getamna.com</a>). 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.<p>It&#x27;s funny because most people who try Amna are like , whoa, how did you make Chrome so fast? They just don&#x27;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&#x27;re back to a crawl.

The most interesting takeaway - the overall resource savings good adblockers provide - is buried under the IMO less interesting graphs showing bad extensions:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.debugbear.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;chrome-extension-performance-2021#how-do-ad-blockers-and-privacy-tools-affect-browser-performance" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.debugbear.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;chrome-extension-performance-...</a><p>&gt; Without ad-blockers per-page CPU time is 17.5 seconds.<p>This is completely insane. Of course it&#x27;s a small fraction of that with good ad blockers.<p>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).

&gt; Regression in Save to Pocket<p>&gt; In last year&#x27;s tests, Save to Pocket injected one small stylesheet into every page, but this had no noticeable impact on performance.<p>&gt; However, Save to Pocket now always loads a 2 MB JavaScript file, adding 110 milliseconds of CPU time.<p>Probably a good time to start using Pockets bookmarklet:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.getpocket.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;987-using-the-pocket-bookmarklet" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.getpocket.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;987-using-the-pocket-book...</a>

&gt;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&#x27;ll see later on.<p>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 ).<p>The same with Ad Block. I just use NextDNS now and it is so much better.

&quot;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.&quot; I have to wonder if this could be somehow avoided...

I have not heard of many of the ad blockers in this list [0].<p>However, it was good to see that UBlock Origin is consistently performing better than most of the other &quot;security&quot; extensions.<p>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!<p>[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.debugbear.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;chrome-extension-performance-2021&#x2F;#top-1000-extensions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.debugbear.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;chrome-extension-performance-...</a><p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dbb-dev.imgix.net&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2021-chrome-extension-performance&#x2F;top-1000-toyota-memory.png?auto=format&amp;dpr=2&amp;width=700" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dbb-dev.imgix.net&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2021-chrome-extension-perform...</a>

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

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?<p>Shocked!

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

this has been shared 4 times in the past 2 weeks

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

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