Here's why Chrome is SLOW (It's NOT your RAM)

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

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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

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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