My Chrome had 47 extensions installed. Forty-seven.

I didn't even know that was possible until last Wednesday when my laptop took three full minutes to open an empty tab. Not loading a page — just opening a blank tab. Something had to change.

The purge

So I went to `chrome://extensions` and just scrolled. And scrolled. It was embarrassing, honestly.

Half of them I'd installed years ago for one specific task and never touched again. A QR code generator from 2022 (used it exactly once). A color picker I forgot existed. Three different screenshot tools because apparently past-me couldn't commit to just one. Something called "Momentum" that replaced my new tab page with inspirational quotes — I don't even remember installing that.

I kept exactly six:

• uBlock Origin (non-negotiable)


• Bitwarden


• React DevTools


• Dark Reader


• JSON Viewer

That's it. Five actually. I miscounted.

What happened next

Chrome went from "I need to lie down" to "what's next?" in about ten seconds. New tabs opened instantly. Gmail loaded before I finished clicking. The fan stopped sounding like a dying helicopter.

But here's what I wasn't expecting — my battery life jumped by almost an hour and a half. From around 3.5 hours to just over 5. Same laptop, same charger, same everything.

Each extension runs its own background process. Some of them are basically tiny apps running 24/7 inside your browser, doing god knows what. I checked Task Manager before and after — Chrome went from using 3.2 gigs of RAM to under 800 megs.

Do I miss any of them?

Honestly? Not a single one.

Okay wait — I do miss Grammarly sometimes when writing emails. But I was paying $12/month for something that made me lazier at proofreading. My emails have more typos now but they sound more like me and less like a robot wrote them. Which is — you know what, that's kind of ironic.

If your laptop feels slow and you've already tried the obvious fixes, check your extensions. You might be carrying around 40 digital passengers you forgot were there.