man Google Chrome kind of sucks now right I remember when everyone was
screaming stop using Internet Explorer Chrome is so much faster was that all a
lie no actually Chrome was a revolution
it was lightweight fast as I'll get out and it brought great features like tab
sandboxing so that if one of your tabs froze your entire browser didn't have to
crash like the old days so what changed then to turn Chrome into this bloated
RAM devouring Behemoth maybe it was
you me I mean I don't have the best
browsing habits I leave way too many tabs open but Chrome has a way of
dealing with that using Dynamic caching for the tabs I'm not using sure but is
Google the one who installed all those extensions I mean I don't have that many
I just have zoto for tracking my research language
tool tele party and an ad locker could
it be that his insatable thirst for extra functionality is bogging down his
browser as it turns out yes I need to make some Chang
but not every extension is made equal while some had no effect on browser
performance others like last pass reduced performance by as much as 12% an
effect that Stacks across your library of resource sucking add-ons with 2third
of people using Chrome as a default browser it's clear that we need to see
just how bad this situation is explore what can be done to fix it and talk
about Google's solution including why it might be a bad one so quickly now to the
lab wait this isn't the lab this is the
segue to our sponsor ODU if you own a
business you'll know what I mean when I say you probably have too many apps
running at the same time with odu's all-in-one business software you can
combine all of those into a single unified platform so click the link in
the description to learn more our Labs team has a fair bit of experience under
their belt testing video games and productivity apps but this is one of our
first for into browser performance and
how exactly you measure browser performance is a big question primarily
because browsers are big programs chromium the open source framework that
Chrome is based on is 31 million lines
of code that is almost as much as the Linux kernel the core of Linux based
operating systems and it's close to the estimated count for older complete
operating systems like Windows XP which Probably sounds ludicrous right until
you consider that I mean outside of games how many programs do you run that
aren't in your browser and of those ones how many of them are just web apps that
could run in your browser so the thing is modern browsers need to be able to
support pretty much everything from 28-year-old geoc cities pages to
full-blown Photoshop clones so coming back to the question of how to measure
their performance it's challenging because browsers do a lot of different things
but we're going to do our best starting with a machine that is based on the most
common specifications in a recent steam Hardware survey to look at memory use we
opened up Chrome to a set of common web pages and on a clean system measured our
idle RAM usage at around 1.1 GB which
increased to 1.25 when we were streaming 4K video even on a system with just 8
gigs of RAM that's not a problematic amount of usage and it's important to
note that even if it was higher that isn't necessarily A Bad Thing programs
that need to access information quickly will benefit from using up more R and as
long as they give it up in the event that your Os or another program needs it
it's not really a problem but what happens when we add extensions well as
it turns out it depends on the type our password manager last pass and our
thirdparty spell checker grammarly both used considerably more RAM than say
coupon code collector honey one extension insert usual disclaimer about
the impact on creators actually reduced our overall RAM usage and that was
ublock origin which is clearly effectively blocking ads and trackers
from sapping our system resources though funnily enough the more popular ad block
extension didn't have the same effect which kind of makes us question its
Effectiveness especially when they advertise that their extension saves
memory overall with 10 of the most popular extensions we observed a nearly
50% increase in RAM usage with half a
dozen tabs open that's not that big of a deal but as your tab addiction grows so
unfortunately does your Problem by the time we reached 48 tabs we were looking
at a whole 2 GB of extra RAM usage for
what is functionally the same user experience I mean you're not looking at
all those Windows at once are you I mean of course if you have ample system
memory you're probably not going to notice the difference anyway will you
actually you might to gauge performance
of our browsers we ran several benchmarks that aim to test the many
features of the web in motion Mark which measures Graphics per performance in our
browser most of our extensions caused virtually no change in performance
except this is kind of a funny one our ad blockers you see ad blockers need to
interact with the rendering pipeline in order to hide ads without turning your
web pages into a completely fragmented mess and that appears to have resulted
in a reduction in in browser rendering performance now in the real world this
slowdown is going to be masked by other speed benefits but we thought it was an
interesting observation nonetheless moving on to speedometer a benchmark
that's f focused on simulating user experiences like working with a to-do
list editing Rich Text rendering charts and reading news sites we found a
totally different story here it's last pass causing a big slowdown and our best
guess is that this is due to last pass trying to scan every text field for
potential autofill opportunities in jet stream 2 a benchmark that's focused on
smooth operation we found that ad block and
grammarly did a lot of damage but then last pass was relatively benign and then
in web expert 4.0 we measured just 3%
reduced performance with all of our extensions enabled at once so sometimes
your extensions matter sometimes they don't and sometimes different ones will
or won't the results just don't really
seem to add up to a clear picture but hey maybe the problem is we're looking
too closely if we zoom out and look at the overall a clear Trend develops
especially when we configure our browser like a regular person would and we have
multiple extensions running concurrently with everything enabled we lose
something like a quarter of our performance in the Chrome web browser if
you're a major Surfer 25% that's the
kind of difference that you could really notice in day-to-day use I mean think of
all the extra LTT behind the scenes that you could watch on lm. g/ flat plane
with all that extra time so what do we do about this well some extensions are
always consuming some level of system resources and you can track this
Yourself by pressing shift escape to open the Chrome tab task manager at the
bottom of your list will be your extensions and writing this right now
I'm noticing some of my extensions being needlessly active page downloader single
file why is that open I'm not downloading anything but then the PDF
editing extension that I'm using seems to respect the fact that I don't always
need it running and it's not consuming anything now's a perfect time then to go
through and call some of your more inconsiderate extensions especially if
you aren't using them that much anymore all it'll cost you is a few seconds to
click that little puzzle block and here's a good rule of thumb if you don't
remember the last time you used it or what it's for just get rid of it you can
always reinstall it later if you have lots of RAM and good tab management
turning off the memory saving feature in Chrome will speed things up as well as
Chrome will spend less time reloading Pages preloading Pages can also speed
things up but if you're someone who uses an ad blocker or a privacy extension
pre-loading isn't really an option speaking of privacy this is unrelated to
your extensions but what you're in the menu why not stop by the add privacy
section and turn all of that tracking off we can't really give you an after
result for the impact of all the changes you just made I mean your mileage may
vary depending on what you removed or didn't and your overall web browsing
habits but from what we've seen anecdotally it is very possible that
you'll notice a difference just not in startup times
this was a really interesting part of our test that we're tacking on the end here we found that with a reasonable
extension load out the application takes about the same amount of time to Launch
regardless of what you do or don't have active then again I guess who cares
anyway because when's the last time you closed Chrome I see that update button
the last thing that you can do is to uninstall chrome and I'm only kind of
joking right now the roll out of Google's manifest V3 is set to
dramatically change the capabilities of chromium extensions which by the way
also affect Microsoft Edge now especially hindering the effectiveness
of ad blockers and privacy enhancing extensions we have haven't tested
firefox's performance with you know extensions or without cuz realistically
most of you aren't using it but hey maybe next time we do an update on this
the situation will have changed because you'll have listened to Our advice why
not give it a try and while you're at it why not try out our sponsor Odo if
you're running a business keeping track of a hundred different apps all running
at once can be a pain I mean just imagine all those Chrome tabs with odu's
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hey you can get access to that for free so start saving time and resources by
unifying your processes with ODU you can check them out in the description for a
free 14-day trial or to set up a demo with their expert team thanks for
watching if you guys liked this video maybe you'll enjoy another Deep dive into minor differences in computer
performance check out our video where we tested 12 of the same CPU so that we
could find a set of them that were nearly identical in performance why did
we need those we'll never tell well we will in that video but not
here