Top all-time · #2028
debugbear.com
Company blog · debugbear.com/blog · on HN as mostlystaticwebprogramming
debugbear.com is the company blog at debugbear.com, writing about web and programming. Since 2018, 35 different Hacker News readers have linked it 92 times, most often “Show HN: A website monitoring tool for front-end developers”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (16) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite DebugBear's blog for measurements of Chrome extension performance, including ad blocker impact, and for counts of Chrome extensions. Commenters also mention its performance monitoring service.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 16 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Show HN: A website monitoring tool for front-end developers5 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2018-09-17
- How do Chrome extensions impact browser performance?5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-07-06
- Performance Impact of Ad Blockers (2020)4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-06-23
- Counting Chrome Extensions – Statistics on the Chrome Web Store4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-06-30
- How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-06-15
- Measuring the performance impact of Chrome extensions3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-12-05
- Is the web getting slower?3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-08-24
- How Do Chrome Extensions Impact Website Performance in 2024?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-05-16
- Resource Prefetching May Slow Down Your Website2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-02-27
- Front-End JavaScript Performance2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-09-10
What Hacker News says?
Maybe: https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/10-29-2026-suspected-... As of now, DebugBear webite has been taken offline: https://www.debugbear.com/ And they just posted on Twitter: https://x.com/DebugBear/status/2115930681398239278
Comment linking /
on “Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance”Submitted Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow? as a story · 492 points
HN discussion> 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-perform...…
Comment linking /blog/2020-chrome-extension-performance-report
on “Chrome exempts Google sites from user site data settings”Submitted How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance as a story · 414 points
HN discussionThere's also this tool we built a while ago to break down JSON size by key. https://www.debugbear.com/json-size-analyzer
Comment linking /json-size-analyzer
on “JSON Crack – Visualize JSON data into graphs”Submitted Example.com just launched the biggest redesign in decades as a story · 363 points
HN discussionDebugBear | Web Performance Advocate / Technical Writer | REMOTE (UK-ish working hours) | Budget: $60k - $100k a year DebugBear helps companies monitor and optimize the speed of their websites. Typical users of our product are front-end developers, technical SEOs, and business owners. We’re looking for someone who wants to develop a deep understanding of web performance and create technical content on this topic. Fo…
Comment linking /blog/chrome-extension-performance-2021
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2022)”Submitted Performant Front-End Architecture as a story · 305 points
HN discussionHere are the test results for Dark Reader: https://www.debugbear.com/chrome-extension-performance-looku... I also briefly mention it in the section on FCP, explaining why it makes sense for the extension to use render-blocking content scripts. https://www.debugbear.com/blog/2020-chrome-extension-perform...
Comment linking /blog/2020-chrome-extension-performance-report
on “How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance”Submitted Is the web getting slower? as a story · 269 points
HN discussionI ran the tests 7 times and then took the median. I'll look into quantifying variance more, but for now here's a boxplot for total on-page CPU time. https://gist.github.com/mattzeunert/de3c8aedd2936a34eeb88b62... I ran tests on example.com, apple.com, and a WCPO news article (for the ad blocker tests). The biggest performance issue is that extensions just dump large scripts into pages indiscriminately. Most of the t…
Comment linking /blog/measuring-the-performance-impact-of-chrome-extensions
on “How the most popular Chrome extensions affect browser performance”Submitted Performance Impact of Ad Blockers (2020) as a story · 170 points
HN discussionDebugBear | 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 matt@debugbear.com if you have any questions,…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2021)”Submitted How do Chrome extensions impact browser performance? as a story · 152 points
HN discussionJust 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)
Comment linking /
on “Performant Front-End Architecture”Submitted Keeping your JavaScript bundle size in check as a story · 13 points
HN discussionAlright, 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-perform... How did you come about your results? Did you use selenium? Or did you catalog all the data by hand? Also, do yo…
Comment linking /blog/2020-chrome-extension-performance-report
on “Safari is adopting an extensions API similar to Firefox’s WebExtensions”Submitted Show HN: A website monitoring tool for front-end developers as a story · 7 points
HN discussion> That means that when you are running ublock origin your browser is working at 87.85% capacity. No it's not, at this point your are spreading FUD about uBO. This is a benchmark specialized for one thing, the creation/deletion of DOM nodes, a completely unrealistic scenario in the real world -- web sites do not repeatedly create nodes just to have them deleted as soon as they are inserted, as fast as possible. uBO's…
Comment linking /blog/2020-chrome-extension-performance-report
on “Safari is adopting an extensions API similar to Firefox’s WebExtensions”Submitted Blowing up HTML size with responsive images as a story · 6 points
HN discussionuBlock Origin: https://www.debugbear.com/chrome-extension-performance-looku... I am skeptical system-wide blockers would slow down less, especially considering the browser has to fire the network requests no matter what, while in-browser blockers prevent blocked network requests from being fired at all.
Comment linking /chrome-extension-performance-lookup?search=uBlock%20Origin
on “Safari is adopting an extensions API similar to Firefox’s WebExtensions”Submitted Inlining Critical CSS: Does It Make Your Website Faster? as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> 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
Comment linking /blog/counting-chrome-extensions
on “Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?”Submitted What's the Fastest Self-Checkout: An Input Latency Analysis as a story · 4 points
HN discussionDesktop bandwidth is improving over time, but as I understand HTTP Archive is still using a 5 Mbps cable connection. From their FAQ/changelog [1]: > 19 Mar 2013: The default connection speed was increased from DSL (1.5 mbps) to Cable (5.0 mbps). This only affects IE (not iPhone). There was another popular article on HN a while ago [2], claiming mobile websites had gotten slower since 2011. But actually HTTP Archive…
Comment linking /blog/is-the-web-getting-slower
on “Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster”Submitted The Guide to Font Performance Optimization as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAuthor here. Most of the negative performance impact comes running the injected JavaScript code, so it will be the same on all websites. I tested different sites in 2018, but it's harder to see the performance impact of an extension, because variability between tests is larger for more complex pages. https://www.debugbear.com/blog/measuring-the-performance-imp... Generally the site you're on doesn't matter. Ad block…
Comment linking /public/blog/chrome-extension-performance/all-extensions.png
on “Performance Impact of Ad Blockers (2020)”Submitted How do Chrome extensions impact browser performance? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAt 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-perform... .
Comment linking /blog/2020-chrome-extension-performance-report
on “Performance Impact of Ad Blockers (2020)”Submitted Website Builder Performance Review as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
