Chromium Blog

I pulled the Honey extension a while ago to poke through it in order to better understand it and the first interesting thing I found is that despite the Google order that they'll no longer allow obfuscated Chrome extensions[0] the Honey extension is still - a year later - a large 2MB+ Javascript blob (webpack compiled and minified) [1]

I've been meaning to go back into it to figure out what exactly they're doing but never found the time

$4B cash on an extension that is at the mercy of Google and it's ever-changing rules and sporadic enforcement seems a risk

[0] https://blog.chromium.org/2018/10/trustworthy-chrome-extensions-by-default.html

[1] https://robwu.nl/crxviewer/?crx=https%3A%2F%2Fchrome.google.com%2Fwebstore%2Fdetail%2Fhoney%2Fbmnlcjabgnpnenekpadlanbbkooimhnj%2Frelated

That's an argument for disabling large GIF autoplay or tying it to the autoplay setting, not for removing the autoplay setting entirely!

Though I guess in the extreme case a webpage could have a huge grid of 1x1px divs that change color in a requestAnimationFrame callback based on data retrieved over XHR.

So I can kinda see their point of view. It still seems a bit too far in the other direction if you ask me though.

... But enough grumbling. I wanted to point out the following documents for more context:

https://blog.chromium.org/2017/09/unified-autoplay.html (Somewhat wordsmithed...)

https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/audio-video/autoplay

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EH7qZatVnTXsBGvQc_53R97Z0xqm6zRblKg3eVmNp30/edit

Original discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34547259

This is really, really cool!

Skia is a incredible abstraction layer. The linked article at the top of the OP https://fathy.fr/html2svg (2022) has some great graphics of how Skia can support various backends including PDF rendering (via https://skia.org/docs/user/sample/pdf/).

It's also worth noting that the Chrome Graphics team is writing yet another Skia rasterization backend, just announced last month: https://blog.chromium.org/2025/07/introducing-skia-graphite-chromes.html

Given that this article came out a couple years ago, it's quite possible that it was seen by the Chrome team and inspired them to look at making a new backend from scratch!

> I have to imagine that some rogue engineeers snuck that functionality in over a decade ago and that it's simply escaped the notice of any PMs or bean counters since then.

Nothing really rouge about it. Google was big on RSS initially as a way to subscribe to content across the web. They had their own RSS Reader after all.

Yet, Chrome added an experimental "Follow" feature in 2021 for RSS subscriptions [1]. Edge did the same calling it "Follow Creators" that mostly focuses on YouTube but also uses RSS [2].

[1] https://blog.chromium.org/2021/05/an-experiment-in-helping-users-and-web.html?m=1

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/17/22887626/microsoft-edge-youtube-intergration-following-feature-canary-test

For some time now I've been getting videos recommended with barely any views (often <100), which are basically completely random.

I wrote this simple extension[0] that removes those videos from the main page, as well as on the sidebar of video pages. The limit is set to below 100 by default, however this can be adjusted. The source code[1] is available as well.

I'm not planning on releasing the Extension for Chrome, since you can't do that for free[2].

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[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/low-go/

[1] https://github.com/mauricesvp/low-go

[2] https://blog.chromium.org/2020/03/new-developer-dashboard-and.html

Wow! Hold right there. Chrome uses shared memory among it's spawned processes on all operating systems.

If you use Task Manager (Windows) / Activity Monitor (OSX) or something similar in Linux, you would see memory over-reported.

Google for this:
http://www.google.com/search?q=chrome+"shared+memory"

Some info:
http://www.chromium.org/developers/memory-usage-backgrounder

Some more info:
http://blog.chromium.org/2008/09/google-chrome-memory-usage-good-and-bad.html

Best tool to see the memory usage is chrome itself: about://memory -> check the real sum at the end of the page.