Chrome extensions are a great way to improve your web browsing, but some of them can slow down your browser. The development team behind DebugBear, a web page optimization service, analyzed 5,000 extensions to see how they affected Google Chrome. According to their findings, some websites can cause longer loading times on websites, although this depends on the way data is processed. Certain are better than others.
DebugBear states that extensions that process data “before a page has been rendered will have a much greater impact on the user experience.” VPNs seem to be among the worst at this, with some causing a full second of lag. It makes sense why load times would be particularly bad with a VPN, as they ‘route traffic through an intermediate server’. Other extensions that can cause long loading times include Trancy AI Subtitles and Klarna Pay Later.
Extensions that run their code ‘after the page has loaded’ can also affect Chrome, but to an apparently lesser extent. Processing times can result in web page slowdowns as the software puts strain on the hardware, but not always. For example, it was discovered that the Monica AI Assistant adds ‘1.3 seconds of processing time’, but in reality it reduces page load speed. This is because extensions like Monica run ‘as soon as the page starts loading’.
Page interactions
Even if an extension doesn’t cause slow load times, it can cause slow page interactions, meaning clicking around a website might not feel fast. Avira Password Manager reportedly adds a “160 millisecond delay when clicking on… random content (headlines)”. Granted, 160 milliseconds is less than half a second, but we wonder if the delays add up.
For example, let’s say you have seven extensions, each of which individually adds 160 milliseconds of delay. Now imagine if all those slowdowns culminate in a major performance drop. That’s a whole second of delay added to a web page. Is this possible? To be honest, we don’t know, because DebugBear doesn’t indicate whether or not these tools may slow down.
What is true is that most ad blockers can improve your browsing experience. Websites with lots of ads cause immediate slowdown, and without an ad blocker, DebugBear found that the average CPU processing time on websites with lots of ads was 57 seconds. With uBlock Origin installed, the time drops “to just under 4 seconds,” saving your computer valuable energy.
uBlock Origin seems to be one of the best ad blockers you can add to Chrome alongside Malwarebytes and Privacy Badger. AdBlock Plus is one of the worst, because it takes a lot of processing time – more than 40 seconds.
What you can do
So if you’re a frequent Chrome user who experiences browser lag with extensions installed, there’s not much you can do to fix the problem. Fixing extensions is ultimately the responsibility of the developers who created them. But there are a few things you can do to help.
First, the easiest thing you can do is remove the malicious tool or limit it so that it is only enabled on certain sites. DebugBear also recommends using their Chrome extension performance lookup tool to help you find the best, lightweight extensions for the browser.
Check out Ny Breaking’s list of the best ad blockers for 2024. uBlock Origin is the best, but there are other great options.