[HN Gopher] How do Chrome extensions impact browser performance?
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How do Chrome extensions impact browser performance?
Author : fdb
Score : 91 points
Date : 2021-07-21 12:19 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.debugbear.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.debugbear.com)
| somehnacct3757 wrote:
| 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?
|
| Shocked!
| zamadatix wrote:
| All depends what performance metrics you're comparing, there
| are plenty of data points in this article showing ad blockers
| slowing down the browser experience, typically on pages that
| aren't ad-hell. That being said for pages that are ad-hell
| (typical news sites are a perfect example) an adblocker
| prevents loading 90% of the site content so is still faster
| than not. For a page that's 90% not-ad-content it results in a
| slower experience. The latter gives particularly bad results
| for ad-blockers in benchmarks.
|
| All depends what sites you compare.
| ksec wrote:
| >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'll
| see later on.
|
| 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 ).
|
| The same with Ad Block. I just use NextDNS now and it is so much
| better.
| neoncontrails wrote:
| Genuinely curious, is "25 seconds" a typo? The bar graph
| suggests Dark Mode adds an additional 3000ms, presumably
| measured in wall clock time, but IIRC extensions are executed
| in a single thread. So I'm having trouble attributing a
| difference of that magnitude to, say, total CPU time.
| ksec wrote:
| >Genuinely curious, is "25 seconds" a typo?
|
| I am not surprised. Dark Reader have to wait for the whole
| page downloaded before doing all the calculation on a page
| with lots of animations and other graphics image over
| features and CSS layout. ( And it is worst if the image has a
| white background and not transparent ) There are some page
| that are just problematic. So generally speaking it is not a
| very good browsing experience.
| fikama wrote:
| Solution: From what I remember you could solve it by using
| firefox CSS. But it implicate using firefox
| awiesenhofer wrote:
| > Regression in Save to Pocket
|
| > In last year's tests, Save to Pocket injected one small
| stylesheet into every page, but this had no noticeable impact on
| performance.
|
| > However, Save to Pocket now always loads a 2 MB JavaScript
| file, adding 110 milliseconds of CPU time.
|
| Probably a good time to start using Pockets bookmarklet:
|
| https://help.getpocket.com/article/987-using-the-pocket-book...
| WayToDoor wrote:
| Or just use Firefox, where the button is there by default. Not
| that I like it, but it's a builtin.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| I really like what Firefox represents, but we can't just
| recommend Firefox when many websites don't work well o
| Firefox.
|
| It might not be firefox's fault and I believe we should not
| endorse website browser exclusivity, but the fact is that if
| you have to use teams for instance, it is either the terribly
| inneficient and bug riddled app or the browser version which
| only supports calls on chromium based browsers.
|
| Maybe you have to use Chrome and you have to use that
| particular extension.
| SahAssar wrote:
| If you are a teams customer please file a ticket to improve
| cross-browser support.
|
| The only way this will change is if their customers
| actually say something.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| I mean, there is nothing in the roadmap:
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| gb/microsoft-365/roadmap?filter...
|
| And I already upvoted the support ticket for firefox:
|
| https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public
| /su...
|
| However, teams was just an example. Just to say that
| sometimes people can't just use firefox despite their
| efforts. Trust me I tried for months, and in both the
| companies I worked, either teams or Palo Alto VPN freak
| out with firefox. Had to adopt Brave for the working
| environment. I use firefox for everything else, though.
| capableweb wrote:
| I know of Netflix that doesn't support Firefox for some
| reason (last time I tried) but what other websites don't
| work in Firefox? I'm using Firefox (+uBlock Origin) as my
| daily driver and everything seems to work fine for me.
| SahAssar wrote:
| Netflix works fine for me in FF, but you will get a
| prompt to enable EME (DRM) on first visit on linux.
| plushpuffin wrote:
| For some reason, Key Bank won't let me login using
| Firefox unless I spoof my user agent. They claim it's due
| to security issues with the browser. This is more of an
| active check though. when I pretend to be Chrome using as
| different user agent in a container, everything works
| fine.
|
| Also, ADP (timesheets and paycheck system) frequently
| breaks for Firefox. Sometimes it just won't load any of
| its forms or grids when I'm using Firefox. I think they
| only test with Chrome.
| oauea wrote:
| > Key Bank won't let me login using Firefox unless I
| spoof my user agent
|
| Stop encouraging this behavior and cancel your service,
| then.
|
| > Also, ADP (timesheets and paycheck system) frequently
| breaks for Firefox. Sometimes it just won't load any of
| its forms or grids when I'm using Firefox. I think they
| only test with Chrome.
|
| Was the last time you checked like 10 years ago? Haven't
| seen this happen in quite some time.
| plushpuffin wrote:
| I'm not going to cancel my banking account and move to a
| different bank just because they don't want me accessing
| their website with a particular browser. It's not a big
| deal to bypass it and it's far more of a hassle to
| switch.
|
| No, ADP was broken for Firefox just a few months ago. My
| workplace is on the ESR release channel, so maybe it
| broke for the slightly older ESR version of Firefox?
| opencl wrote:
| Netflix does work in Firefox now, though 4K playback in
| browser is still limited to Edge or Safari.
| weaksauce wrote:
| netflix worked fine for my last time i checked on
| firefox. unless something changed in the last few months
| it's fine
| butz wrote:
| Currently the worst offenders are video chat services using
| old non-standard WebRTC implementation. But this should be
| resolved this year with its deprecation and most services
| hopefully moving to standard WebRTC implementation. As for
| other non-working websites, you can report those directly
| to Firefox, that way they might be able to fix those.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| The Dark Reader performance impact is something I have definitely
| noticed, had to uninstall it, which is a shame because it works
| very well.
| dzaima wrote:
| I've set it to off by default (using a whitelist instead of a
| blacklist), and have some custom dark themes for most sites I
| use anyway. Sucks to have bright pages every now and then, but
| it's still really useful.
| mcraiha wrote:
| "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." I
| have to wonder if this could be somehow avoided...
| Santosh83 wrote:
| It could've been cached once and used repeatedly if only the
| Web had not become so hostile that browsers were forced to
| enforce same-origin...
| iaml wrote:
| What makes you think that it's being loaded over the network?
| It's most likely loading it from fs directly.
| capableweb wrote:
| Parsing a blob that huge does impact performance though.
| iaml wrote:
| It does, but caching/same-origin policies wouldn't change
| anything in this case.
| singlow wrote:
| I avoid it by not installing Grammarly?
| jfk13 wrote:
| > "only a 112 KB Grammarly-check.js script"
|
| Just _that_ requires 112KB? Seems easily an order of magnitude
| bigger than it ought to be.
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| An extension consists of a thin content script loaded into each
| page that exchanges messages with a long-running background
| script. Normally you'd make the content script as thin as
| possible and make the background script do the real work.
| jedimastert wrote:
| Can you expand on this? You make it seem obvious but I'm really
| not sure what you're referring to.
| high_byte wrote:
| it's comparable to website frontend and backend. While
| there's a single, big instance of the server in the back,
| there are many clients rendering their small part in the
| front.
|
| Each time you refresh, only the client is reloaded. To reduce
| loading times, you should have small clients and let the
| server so the heavy lifting.
| flatiron wrote:
| You can bundle js files in extensions... That being said
| parsing 1.3 of cached JS every site hit is pretty silly. No
| clue why their "check" js is even 100k. That's a lot of
| minified js!
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| this has been shared 4 times in the past 2 weeks
| nickphx wrote:
| Seems to be shilling a commercial version of
| https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Interestingly I'm a HN addict who reads HN multiple times a
| day, and this is the first time I've seen it.
| titzer wrote:
| Wow, look at the chart for how much ad blockers _improve_ 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 't be more stark.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| How do you expect The Independent and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
| to make money?
| titzer wrote:
| How do they expect me to make money? I hate to be snarky, as
| I do actually value journalism and think it represents an
| important part of a free society. However, why is it my
| responsibility to participate in their business model? Can we
| fund them with taxes (in a non-dystopian way that keeps
| political interference out of the equation)? After all, they
| don't spend time thinking about my business model.
| Crash0v3rid3 wrote:
| > However, why is it my responsibility to participate in
| their business model?
|
| It's not your responsibility, you can simply not visit
| their site if you don't wish to participate.
|
| > Can we fund them with taxes (in a non-dystopian way that
| keeps political interference out of the equation)?
|
| How can this possibly work?
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Personally I think big tech aggregators like Google and
| Facebook should be taxed to support journalism. That
| could either be a fee when someone clicks on a link or a
| flat amount per year that everyone gets to spend on
| journalism implemented as a tax refund.
|
| These companies have sucked all of the value out of
| journalism. Normally I'd be fine with that, but the
| tragedy of the commons on an entire vital industry seems
| to large to ignore here.
| seph-reed wrote:
| I'd pay 25 cents an article, if they can get together with a
| few other content creators and decide on a shared micro-
| transaction system.
| nefitty wrote:
| I have been waiting for this for a decade. Now that I'm a
| software developer I can only imagine what the difficulties
| of implementing this would be.
| samlevine wrote:
| High level, there are basically four paths to getting revenue
| in journalism:
|
| - ads
|
| - subscribers
|
| - donations from small patrons
|
| - donations from large patrons
|
| These cover a lot of different business models.
|
| If you want to make money at journalism (or just keep the
| lights on), focusing on ads when they've been a declining
| source of revenue for decades is kind of crazy. And that's
| not due to ad blocking.
| apeace wrote:
| It's worth mentioning that ads can also be delivered
| without tracking and oodles of Javascript. Sell ad
| placements that are images, even GIFs.
| Steltek wrote:
| People were blocking ads long before those were reasons.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They should have invented Craigslist. No newspaper did this
| because they couldn't see the value of free classifieds
| driving traffic for select paid listings.
| smoldesu wrote:
| By providing better journalism than what I can get for free.
| That starts with the user experience, which is currently
| quite poor.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| No one is willing to pay for local journalism when every
| site will copy your story as soon as it breaks.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Great, that puts it on-par with the status quo.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| The problem is the free services can't exist without the
| originators. The originators can't exist without revenue.
| If the journalists who are actually writing the pieces as
| opposed to copying them don't get paid the whole thing
| falls apart.
| catchmeifyoucan wrote:
| I knew it!
|
| I'm working on a tool called amna (https://getamna.com). 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.
|
| It's funny because most people who try Amna are like , whoa, how
| did you make Chrome so fast? They just don'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're back to a crawl.
| imjustsaying wrote:
| Anyone know what the fastest-loading password manager might be?
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| The most interesting takeaway - the overall resource savings good
| adblockers provide - is buried under the IMO less interesting
| graphs showing bad extensions:
|
| https://www.debugbear.com/blog/chrome-extension-performance-...
|
| > Without ad-blockers per-page CPU time is 17.5 seconds.
|
| This is completely insane. Of course it's a small fraction of
| that with good ad blockers.
|
| 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).
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