Chrome Quick Tip: How To Identify Which Extensions Slow Everything Down

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Browser extensions are great, especially those designed well in a good platform like Chrome. However, having too many of them may have the opposite effect that slows your browsing experience to a crawl. Generally speaking, the more extensions you install, the more memory the browser needs to allocate, the better chance the browsing performance will suffer.

When the browser is slow to a crawl, it’s usually the time to clean up the mess to disable or uninstall the ones that hog memory the most. But the question is how?

It’s actually fairly easy in Chrome. All the tools you need for memory usage analysis are built right into the browser. It’s called Chrome Task Manager, which is very similar to Windows’s own Task Manager. If you haven’t used it yet, it’s time to explore.

To access Chrome Task Manager, click the 3-line menu button, More Tools, and select Task Manager. Or simply press shift+ESC inside Chrome to launch it directly.

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The first 2 columns, Task & Memory, are the ones you need to pay attention. Since all installed and enabled extensions are listed in there with actual memory usage listed right next in the 2nd column, it’s quite easy to pinpoint which ones are hogging memory. You can click Memory tab to sort by the memory usage to give you an easier look.

To disable an extension in Chrome, click the 3-line Menu button, More Tools and select Extensions. Or you can type chrome://extensions in the address bar to access Extensions page directly. Un-checking the Enable box to disable the specific extension, or you can click on the recycle bin to completely remove it out of Chrome.

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While we are in Chrome talking about memory usage, do you also know Chrome has a About Memory (chrome://memory-redirect) page that shows you a detailed page of how much total of memory used by each of browsers that are currently running, not just Chrome, but IE, Firefox as well.

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