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DebugBear Blog
debugbear.com · Company blog · on HN since 2018
DebugBear, a website performance monitoring company, publishes studies on web speed and how Chrome extensions affect browser performance.
What HN saysCommenters note the post comes from a developer-run monitoring service; one finds uBlock Origin performing better than other extensions in its data.
32HN people shared it
12linked it in comments
60stories submitted
1.9Kstory points
12 months agolast shared
2018people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance10 people · 590 points · first shared 2020 · 128 comments on HN
- 2How do Chrome extensions impact browser performance?8 people · 163 points · first shared 2021 · 90 comments on HN
- 3Counting Chrome Extensions – Statistics on the Chrome Web Store4 people · 1 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 4Is the web getting slower?3 people · 273 points · first shared 2020 · 263 comments on HN
- 5Show HN: A website monitoring tool for front-end developers3 people · 10 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 6Measuring the performance impact of Chrome extensions3 people · 5 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 7Resource Prefetching May Slow Down Your Website2 people · 5 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 8How Do Chrome Extensions Impact Website Performance in 2024?2 people · 4 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 9Front-End JavaScript Performance2 people · 2 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 10Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?1 people · 492 points · first shared 2020 · 384 comments on HN
- 11Performant Front-End Architecture1 people · 305 points · first shared 2020 · 114 comments on HN
- 12Keeping your JavaScript bundle size in check1 people · 13 points · first shared 2018 · 3 comments on HN
- 13Blowing up HTML size with responsive images1 people · 6 points · first shared 2021 · 1 comments on HN
- 14Brand New Performance Features in Chrome DevTools1 people · 5 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 15What's the Fastest Self-Checkout: An Input Latency Analysis1 people · 4 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
mtmail · 2023-02-07
There's services specialized in crawling + VPN. Often used to crawl shopping websites or Google result pages. One example is https://www.scrapingbee.com and you select the country https://www.scrapingbee.com/documentation/country_codes/ They can do screenshots, too.
If the concern is uptime there's a couple of service that also do regular screenshots and alerts when the website is slow or unresponsive. https://www.debugbear.com/ for example.
For a super quick check (every couple of months I need this) I usually use https://www.webpagetest.org/ Under 'advanced configuration' there's a dropdown of locations around the world. I gives a screenshot but not access to the full HTML.
mostlystatic · 2021-11-01
DebugBear | Full-stack developer | Remote/Europe | Full-time | https://www.debugbear.com/
DebugBear is a website monitoring monitoring service that provides in-depth reporting on speed and quality metrics. I'm currently running it by myself and am looking for someone who can take on some of the development work.
Tech: TypeScript, Node, Postgres, Google Cloud, React
Email [email protected] if you have any questions, or apply here: https://apply.workable.com/debugbear/j/F4A854E331/
FailMore · 2020-02-10
Just for balance, the company behind the blog post is also a developer-ran performance monitoring service: https://www.debugbear.com/ (Disclosure: this person is not me, but I have used the service and I do know the person)
lapcat · 2022-07-30
> I’ve been asked not to share the name.
Asked by whom? Your (hopefully former?) friend who sold out millions of people for malware? Are those millions of people aware that they were infected with malware? Not sure how this can be a secret.
> It wasn’t a big extension though, only a few million installs.
That's big!
Apparently there are only 300some Chrome extensions with over a million users. https://www.debugbear.com/blog/counting-chrome-extensions
My user base is orders of magnitude less, so I wouldn't worry about my selling out for $millions.
_Understated_ · 2021-07-22
I have not heard of many of the ad blockers in this list [0].
However, it was good to see that UBlock Origin is consistently performing better than most of the other "security" extensions.
Edit: It appears that this anchor is used more than once on that page so it takes you to the wrong link! This [1] is the image I wanted to link to!
[0] - https://www.debugbear.com/blog/chrome-extension-performance-2021/#top-…
[1] - https://dbb-dev.imgix.net/blog/2021-chrome-extension-performance/top-1…
tgsovlerkhgsel · 2021-07-21
The most interesting takeaway - the overall resource savings good adblockers provide - is buried under the IMO less interesting graphs showing bad extensions:
https://www.debugbear.com/blog/chrome-extension-performance-2021#how-d…
> Without ad-blockers per-page CPU time is 17.5 seconds.
This is completely insane. Of course it's a small fraction of that with good ad blockers.
Back when Firefox Mobile was near-unusably slow, ad blocking made it competitive. Overall, the experience (speed and UX annoyances) were roughly the same in both (the removal of ads making up for the clunky Firefox UI).
loeg · 2021-02-07
At least uBlock Origin and probably most of the other adblockers on this list meet this standard. It's illustrated by the network requests / page weight figure here: https://www.debugbear.com/blog/2020-chrome-extension-performance-repor… .
tedunangst · 2021-02-07
_qulr · 2021-01-18
> It's actually not that hard to monetize browser extensions
It's actually not that hard to become a billionaire [points at some billionaires]
By the way, here are some stats on Chrome extensions:
https://www.debugbear.com/blog/counting-chrome-extensions
gorhill · 2020-10-18
> the IPC overhead in routing all requests through the extension
The case has never been made that this is the issue of why wesites take long to load nowadays, and rather the finding is that content blockers help significantly page load speed.[1]
You seem eager to uncritically accept Google claims while leaving out the views of the critics.[2]
* * *
[1] https://www.debugbear.com/blog/2020-chrome-extension-performance-repor…
[2]
https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2019/07/googles-plans-chrome-extensio…
bluedays · 2020-06-24
Alright, cool.
I admire your work, gorhill, I do. However I'm not convinced of your results. Lets go ahead and run some benchmarks. First, would you mind tell me how you can about your results?
I'm specifically interested in your results here: https://www.debugbear.com/blog/2020-chrome-extension-performance-repor…
How did you come about your results? Did you use selenium? Or did you catalog all the data by hand? Also, do you have the data available? I'm going to run the tests myself, and any insight would be appreciated. I would especially appreciate it if you could allow me to review the data you have on hand but I understand if you don't want to provide it.
Also, slightly beside the point but is Raymond.cc your site? Just curious.
Thanks for your help!
tech234a · 2022-12-10
Note that Google's collection doesn't seem to include all of their extensions. For example, they are missing Google Voice, Google Dictionary, Send from Gmail, Page Analytics, Google Tone, Chrome Web Store Launcher, RSS Subscription Extension, Google Scholar Button, IBA Opt-out, Google Mail Checker, Google Similar Pages, Endpoint Verification, Chrome Remote Desktop, Chromebook Recovery Utility, Certificate Enrollment for Chrome OS, Screen Reader, Print, Google Docs Offline, and I'm sure there are plenty of other Google extensions that I missed in my search.
Also, this site [1] has been tracking Manifest V3 migration, but I think they might be incorrectly including Apps and Themes in their counts (I believe the 180K figure represents all of the items on the store [2]) which might be throwing off the numbers a bit.
[1]: https://chrome-stats.com/manifest-v3-migration
[2]: https://www.debugbear.com/blog/counting-chrome-extensions