Exthouse – Analyze the impact of a browser extension on web performance | Hacker News Reader

Exthouse – Analyze the impact of a browser extension on web performance

github.com

45 pointsTomAnthony10 comments

I'd count that as yet another evidence that the recent move from Google to reduce the power of ad-blocking extensions cannot be justified by «performances concerns for their users» as they said earlier, since µBlock Origin has zero overhead in this benchmark.

The fact that µBlock Origin is fast provides exactly zero evidence about other extensions abusing the WebRequest API resulting in battery drain, disclosure of private information like account credentials, and a bad user experience because of an apparently slow browser.

The webRequest API is not going away, they are just removing the blocking ability. Likewise, so far I have also seen "exactly zero evidence" that the blocking ability of the webRequest API is causing all the issues your are mentioning.

If the browser gets slow due to extensions, offer a "cleanup" feature that benchmarks extensions and calls out offending players.

Instead of that, they're disallowing ad-blocking. Not suspicious at all from a company that makes all of its money from serving ads.

Interesting, but I'm currently running 61 extensions in my Chrome non-private sessions, without noticeable impact, so I'm not overly concerned that extensions affect performance.

The thing that bothers me about extensions is that I have usually no control whatsoever over what information any extension might think they need to phone home about. A tool that logged this per extension would seem more useful to me. Not sure if this is even possible?

I have a lot of extensions in my browsers, and I'm not at all confident about their performance impact. What tells you that your extensions don't have noticeable impact, if you haven't looked at a comparison like this?

What I mean is that most sites load within a reasonable time frame for me, i.e. I don't usually have any 'oh, this is slow' feelings when browsing. When it happens it's close to always my connection that's at fault, or the odd site that simply is too heavy. That's all.

Hopefully more tools like this encourage extension developers to think about performance.

It gives uBlock Origin a score of 100 in the Screenshots, but does this actually translate to 100% performance compared to page load without extension?

From what I can see in the github chart it results in zero change compared to not having the extension.

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