
Exthouse – Analyze the impact of a browser extension on web performance - TomAnthony
https://github.com/treosh/exthouse
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littlestymaar
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.

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panarky
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.

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gorhill
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.

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stareatgoats
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?

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alanbernstein
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?

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stareatgoats
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.

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

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NewsAware
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?

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

