Has Your Browser Gone Slow?

[sunny-dave]

All three browsers (Chrome/Safari/Firefox) on both iMacs and even my antediluvian Win10 laptop slowed to a crawl last night - a gradual process rather than a sudden event. Clearing the relevant caches seemed to help, but only for a while as response speeds fell through the floor again within a few minutes - slower than a slow sloth on a particularly dozy night. Firefox was particularly badly hit.

Not the router/wifi - everything else running just ticketyboo, at blazing fast rates.

I eventually tracked down the problem to a well known (and not usually mentioned herein) add-on/extension - turning it off helped a bit, but deleting and doing a fresh installation cured the problem completely. Whether ABP was itself the problem, or whether it was interacting with one of the (very few) other extensions I routinely run I have no idea - I just found that a full delete/reinstall resulted in a very dramatic return to proper speeds.

NB : I don't routinely run ABP on AB, and don't encourage anyone else to do so - it's not fair on the providers of the service - I only deploy it here on the odd occasions when an advert(iser) goes rogue.

Hope this may help anyone else who is unexpectedly in the slow lane.

SDxx

[aelmpvw]

no probs here and i run the aforementioned extension

[emmie]

my firefox seemed to die a sudden death. I got it going again, but i have an old computer that needs replacing..

[Buenchico]

I use Firefox without 'a certain extension' but I still don't see any ads (because Firefox now seems to block them by default anyway).

If I found that several different web browsers on the same machine were running at a crawl (and I was confident that it wasn't a problem with either my broadband speed or my wi-fi connection), I'd start by examining the CPU usage. I'd be looking either for malware or for something like a Windows (or anti-virus) update which was hogging all of my computer's processing power.