An updated report has been prepared with the result of a study of the impact on browser performance and user experience of thousands of the most popular Chrome add-ons. Compared to last year's test, the new study measured the change in performance when opening apple.com, toyota.com, The Independent, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in addition to a simple stub page.
The findings of the study have not changed: many popular add-ons, such as Honey, Evernote Web Clippe and Avira Browser Safety, can significantly reduce the performance of opening sites in Chrome. On the other hand, it is noted that ad-blocking and privacy add-ons can significantly improve performance when browsing sites that contain a large number of ad units.
Of particular interest is the study of the impact of the use of ad blockers on the speed of opening pages. By disabling the code that renders ads and counters, the consumption of CPU time when opening The Independent and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette sites using the most effective Ghostery blocker was reduced from 17.5 seconds. up to 1.7 sec, i.e. 10 times. For the less efficient of the Trustnav blockers tested, CPU consumption was reduced to 7.4 seconds, i.e. by 57%.
Some ad blocking add-ons actively use CPU resources in the background, which can increase the overall load on the system despite speeding up page processing. In a combined test that takes into account the load on the CPU when opening the page and in the background, Ghostery and uBlock Origin demonstrate the highest efficiency.
At the same time, in addition to speeding up page processing, using ad blockers significantly reduces traffic (from 43% to 66%) and the number of network requests sent (from 83% to 90%).
Ad blockers also reduce memory consumption, for example, when using the Disconnect add-on, the memory consumption of the browser when opening The Independent and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette pages is reduced from 574 MB to 260 MB, i.Π΅. by 54%, which offsets the memory cost of storing block lists.
In performance testing of add-ons, looking at the top 100 add-ons, Evernote Web Clipper consumes the most resources when opening the stub page (consuming 368 ms of CPU time). Resource-hungry add-ons also include the Ghostery privacy add-on, Loom for Chrome video messenger, Clever add-on for students, and password managers Avira and LastPass, which have over a million installs.
In the test that opens the apple.com site, the situation changes and the Dark Reader add-on breaks out into the first place, which spends about 25 seconds of CPU time (mainly due to fitting images to dark design). Significant resources are also consumed by the add-on for searching Honey coupons (+825ms)
When you open the Toyota website, Norton Password Manager breaks out into the lead in creating a parasitic load on the CPU.
In the sample of the 1000 most popular add-ons in terms of CPU consumption during page processing, the top add-ons are: Ubersuggest (consuming 1.6 seconds of CPU time), ProWritingAid Grammar Checker (+658 ms), Meow (637 ms) and MozBar (+604 ms). In terms of resource consumption in the background, the leaders are: Avira Safe Shopping (+2.5 sec.), TrafficLight (+1.04 sec.), Virtru Email Protection (+817 ms) and Stylebot (655 ms). Addons that consume the most memory are: AdBlocker by Trustnav (+215MB), Ad-Blocker Pro (+211MB), Hola ad remover (198MB) and Xodo PDF Viewer & Editor (197MB). For comparison, uBlock Origin consumes 27 ms of CPU time when processing a page, spends 48 ms of CPU time in the background and occupies 77 MB of memory.
When running the test on real sites, the situation worsens. For example, the Substitutions add-on, which automatically replaces the code on the page, spends 9.7 seconds of CPU time.
When measuring the latency before starting to render the stub page, of the top 100 add-ons, Clever, Lastpass, and DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials were the worst performing.
When repeating the test on apple.com, Dark Reader had significant problems, which delayed the start of rendering by 4 seconds.
On the toyota site, delays from Dark Reader were not so significant, and blockers of inappropriate content were among the leaders.
In the resource consumption test when a tab is in the background, Avira's Safe Shopping add-on turned out to be the worst performer, using more than 2 seconds of CPU time.
When repeating the test on the toyota website, CPU time consumption of more than 2 seconds was also noted for the Dashlane password manager and the AdGuard AdBlocker ad blocker.
When testing 1000 add-ons on The Independent, uberAgent, Dashlane, and Wappalyzer exceeded 20 seconds of background CPU time.
In terms of memory consumption, ad-blocking and privacy add-ons that have to keep databases of block lists in memory are leading in this category. At the same time, if a large number of sites full of ads are opened in the browser, the total memory consumption of the browser may turn out to be less than without the use of blockers.
When installing several add-ons, the resource consumption from them is summed up.
Compared to last year's study, Grammarly, Microsoft Office, Okta Browser Plugin, Avira Safe Shopping, and Avira Browser Safety add-ons show the most progress, with over 100ms of CPU savings. The biggest deterioration in resource consumption is observed in the Save to Pocket, Loom and Evernote add-ons.
Source: opennet.ru