I’ve been back on Chrome (by way of Chromium) since earlier this year
and recently, I started to experience some extreme slowness when attempting to
type in the address bar.
This slowness was enough for me to file this post in the “productivity”
category, as it was enough for me to be able to feel the lag. I got shit to do,
so waiting around for my browser to start showing my keystrokes in the address
bar was completely unacceptable.
Incidentally, I’ve switched browsers for less, but as I’m committed to having
a consistent browser across Linux, macOS and Android, I had to figure out what
the heck was going on to cause this slowness.
My gut said that the slowness was probably stemming from the auto-fill
capabilities. I don’t clear much from my browser unless I’m having some issues,
so after 6+ months, these history caches were pretty full.
When I had checked, my “browsing history” had over 20,000 items. Upon cleaning
that out, my browser immediately went back to being snappy and responsive.
To clear your browsing history, you can go here:
chrome://settings/clearBrowserData
Then click on “Advanced” to see how many items you have.
By default, “Browsing history” is selected with a handful of other things. You
can get away with only clearing the “Browsing history” (which is what I did) or
just roll with the defaults to clean up some other things as well.
If this doesn’t fix things up for you, I’d probably blame a rogue extension and
troubleshoot from there 😛
