My Google Chrome web browser of late bogged down my work computer to the point of such slowness I could not use it. Chrome created a nice Task Manager tool to see what uses the computer resources. Stuff that I normally look at for servers like CPU, memory, network, etc.

All the last couple weeks, I just closed some tabs or restarted it to refreshen it. Today was a slower morning, so I could take the time to look. I found a bunch of “Subframe” stuff that looked like advertisements. Some of it like doubleclick were obvious. The names for other stuff looked like the stuff I would assume is spam if it were in an email address, so I assumed it the same.

I installed an ad blocker and reload all my tabs. I don’t recall why I don’t have one. It might be work cracking down on browser extensions deemed unsafe?

The memory usage dropped from 9GB to 1.2GB. I didn’t close anything. I just reloaded it without the ads.

My Vivaldi, which I personally use, blocks ads by default. My Firefox also bogged down, so I’ve given it an ad blocker too and expect similar improvements.