Browser extensions add valuable features to your web experience, letting you do things like monitor price changes, customize website appearances, and block annoying ads or scripts. However, not all extensions are created equal, and poorly coded ones can significantly slow down your browsing speed by performing complex analyses or making changes to a page before it fully loads.
To address this issue, Microsoft is testing a new feature in its Edge browser that alerts users when extensions are negatively impacting performance. This “extension performance detector” notifies you when an extension is consuming too many resources, helping you identify which ones might be causing slowdowns.
The performance detector pops up with information on which extensions are using the most system resources, providing a convenient way to disable them directly from the notification or manage them in the extension settings.
According to BleepingComputer, this feature is being tested with users on Edge Canary version 130. If you’re part of the Microsoft Edge Insider program, you can try it out now. Simply type “edge://flags” into the address bar, search for “extension performance detector,” enable the flag, and restart Edge. The detector only triggers for extensions that consume an excessive amount of resources, so if it doesn’t notify you, your current extensions are likely running efficiently.
