DebugBear, a website performance monitoring company, publishes studies on web speed and how Chrome extensions affect browser performance.
Commenters note the post comes from a developer-run monitoring service; one finds uBlock Origin performing better than other extensions in its data.
Note that Google's collection doesn't seem to include all of their extensions. For example, they are missing Google Voice, Google Dictionary, Send from Gmail, Page Analytics, Google Tone, Chrome Web Store Launcher, RSS Subscription Extension, Google Scholar Button, IBA Opt-out, Google Mail Checker, Google Similar Pages, Endpoint Verification, Chrome Remote Desktop, Chromebook Recovery Utility, Certificate Enrollment for Chrome OS, Screen Reader, Print, Google Docs Offline, and I'm sure there are plenty of other Google extensions that I missed in my search.
Also, this site [1] has been tracking Manifest V3 migration, but I think they might be incorrectly including Apps and Themes in their counts (I believe the 180K figure represents all of the items on the store [2]) which might be throwing off the numbers a bit.
[1]: https://chrome-stats.com/manifest-v3-migration
[2]: https://www.debugbear.com/blog/counting-chrome-extensions
Alright, cool.
I admire your work, gorhill, I do. However I'm not convinced of your results. Lets go ahead and run some benchmarks. First, would you mind tell me how you can about your results?
I'm specifically interested in your results here: https://www.debugbear.com/blog/2020-chrome-extension-performance-report#performance-impact-of-ad-blockers
How did you come about your results? Did you use selenium? Or did you catalog all the data by hand? Also, do you have the data available? I'm going to run the tests myself, and any insight would be appreciated. I would especially appreciate it if you could allow me to review the data you have on hand but I understand if you don't want to provide it.
Also, slightly beside the point but is Raymond.cc your site? Just curious.
Thanks for your help!
There's services specialized in crawling + VPN. Often used to crawl shopping websites or Google result pages. One example is https://www.scrapingbee.com and you select the country https://www.scrapingbee.com/documentation/country_codes/ They can do screenshots, too.
If the concern is uptime there's a couple of service that also do regular screenshots and alerts when the website is slow or unresponsive. https://www.debugbear.com/ for example.
For a super quick check (every couple of months I need this) I usually use https://www.webpagetest.org/ Under 'advanced configuration' there's a dropdown of locations around the world. I gives a screenshot but not access to the full HTML.
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-2021#how-do-ad-blockers-and-privacy-tools-affect-browser-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).
> the IPC overhead in routing all requests through the extension
The case has never been made that this is the issue of why wesites take long to load nowadays, and rather the finding is that content blockers help significantly page load speed.[1]
You seem eager to uncritically accept Google claims while leaving out the views of the critics.[2]
* * *
[1] https://www.debugbear.com/blog/2020-chrome-extension-performance-report#performance-impact-of-ad-blockers
[2]
https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2019/07/googles-plans-chrome-extensions-wont-really-help-security
I have not heard of many of the ad blockers in this list [0].
However, it was good to see that UBlock Origin is consistently performing better than most of the other "security" extensions.
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!
[0] - https://www.debugbear.com/blog/chrome-extension-performance-2021/#top-1000-extensions
[1] - https://dbb-dev.imgix.net/blog/2021-chrome-extension-performance/top-1000-toyota-memory.png?auto=format&dpr=2&width=700