Microsoft Edge now alerts you when extensions slow down your PC

Browser extensions are useful because they bring additional functionality to your web browser, allowing you to do things like track price histories for online products, change CSS styling on certain pages, and, of course, block ads and other scripts that get in the way.

Well, browser extensions aren’t always coded well. Depending on what they do, they might have to run various types of analyses and/or make changes to a page before it loads — and if an extension isn’t coded well, all of that processing can slow things to a crawl.

That’s why Microsoft is currently testing an upcoming feature in the Edge browser that detects when extensions are impacting performance and warns you when said extensions are causing slowdowns.

The so-called “extension performance detector” will pop up on screen with details about which installed extensions are using the most resources, making it easy to figure out which ones you should disable in the extension manager (with quick toggles on the pop-up itself).

According to BleepingComputer, the feature is rolling out to users who are on Edge Canary version 130, which you can try yourself by becoming a Microsoft Edge Insider. If you’re on that version, you can turn it on and try it out right now with the following steps:

1. Type edge://flags into the address bar and press Enter.
2. On the resulting page, type extension performance detector into the search field at the top.
3. Locate the flag in the search results, then click the drop-down menu and change it to Enabled.
4. Restart Edge.

The extension performance detector will only flag an extension as problematic if it hogs an unusual amount of resources and/or repeatedly causes performance slowdowns. If it doesn’t flag anything for you, you can rest assured that your extensions are fine.