Absolutely – there's really common cycle I see repeated all over:

1. “(Firefox|Chrome) is slow” 2. “Did you try removing Ad-Block Plus, etc.?” 3. “Now it's fast again!”

I think we're well past the point where the browsers are going to need to start having some UI around monitoring and exposing slow extensions to make it easier for users to learn this.

Absolutely. When I first starting using FF and all the developer tools, it would grind to a halt. Now that I'm a lot more comfortable with the FF toolset, I have a minimal set of extensions and it feels much snappier.

I also use Aurora which is still super fast to me. I also develop with Chrome Canary and the stable Chrome version. Canary has times when its totally useless or when someone breaks the build and I can't use it for a week so until the next update comes out.

All in all, yes, less overhead means a snappier browser to me.

That's my biggest reason for switching from AdBlock+ to Privoxy + https://github.com/skroll/privoxy-adblock . Same blocking rules but uses a ton less memory, since each tab isn't running all of AB+ .