chromium-based browsers almost unuseable since Big Sur 11.3 update

This iMac 21.5” base configuration was a reasonable choice for looking at photos, email, and light web browsing.

Your current usage is seemingly incompatible with a configuration of 8 GB memory and a 5400 RPM HDD.

Your CPU is mostly idle, while your memory and that HDD are pretty clearly overloaded.

It’s unsurprising that this iMac is slow for anything, particularly resource-intensive web browsers.

Memory and internal storage upgrades to iMac 21.5” are less than fun.

Acquire and install a TB-class SSD on USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt, install maxOS on that, and see if this runs any better.

Or offload active apps that you don’t need; maybe remote backup, Java, Chromium-based browsers, whatever.

Or replace this with one of the iMac 24” models, which have faster memory, and far faster SSD storage.

And per another comment above…

Assuming these are from the canonical distribution and not junk acquired elsewhere mimicking them…

Wireshark is a network-monitoring tool.

Homebrew is a commonly-used package manager, and unbound is a DNS server.

One other general comment: there’s a somewhat unusual selection of networking services and low-level network diagnostic tools either now or preciously installed here.

You seem to have a high-speed USB external SSD attached, and it seems to have an operating system installed on it. Why not just boot from that instead?

You are running an old, discontinued version of EtreCheck. You should use EtreCheckPro instead. It won't have radically different output, however.

One change I had to make recently was how to handle the old "failed hard drive" issue. There were just too many relatively recent, or brand new, iMacs that were triggering that. Obviously, the hard drive has not "failed" in these cases. But it runs consistently at performance levels that are just barely above what EtreCheck considers "failing". And the external drives will complicate that too because they will slow down the system just by being attached.

That's the thing about these "free" operating system upgrades. Your computer may have worked well fresh out of the box. But you've installed some funky, 3rd party system modifications, added some slow, USB 2.0 external drives, and upgraded the operating system to a version designed for SSDs. Something's got to give.

Apple is not responsible for the behavior of Chromium-based browsers on macOS. If the issues you encounter are not caused by outdated, or incompatible browser plug-ins, and your browser versions are current with what the vendors presently offer, then you should contact the developers. Surveys are out of scope in these support communities.

The first few releases of Chromium out in the wild were betas of the final release, often accompanied with trojan horses. If you installed Chromium from those releases, it is possible that they have corrupted the foundation of browsers that depend on its software development kit.

That said, installation of macpaw and zeobit optimizers frequently also came along with such trojan horses, and these software should all be removed, to avoid future issue.

Etrecheck has a free feature set that lets you manually verify that all optimizers have been removed.

And you can document its notes here on the board so we can help you ensure you have nothing that could be restricting your web access.

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-250002463

ksaro1 wrote:

how many tabs do you have open? I tend to have between 10-20 tabs open at any one time. I know this puts some burden on the browser and OS.

I just tried to open a bunch of tabs in Chrome. It seemed to work fine but I could hear the fans winding up. It is definitely working harder than Safari.

BTW - All that I've changed on my iMac recently is updating Big Sur from 11.2 to 11.3. I've not added/removed/updated any application. And my point in reporting this in this forum is exactly that, all that has changed on my iMac is the update of Big Sur. And there is now a very noticeable change in the response in these browsers. So, OK it isn't a Mac responsibility about the browsers, but I'm just pointing out that updating the OS has impacted some installed apps, which is never a good thing IMHO for any vendor's changes.

But why doesn't the problem affect Safari? And why didn't the developers of those other browsers investigate the problem while 11.3 was still in beta?

Just look at the legion of issues reported on this forum with SMB that came about from an Apple update quite a while back

Apple has over a billion users. This forum is always going to have a legion of issues reported on everything. I regularly get into shouting matching with people furious that Apple has given them too many fonts and their 3rd party software lists them all. Such is life on the internet.

And to further illustrate changes to Mac OS with unintended (or not?) consequences I can point to the issue with 3rd party USB hubs that I reported over a year ago. I got no response from neither Apple nor anyone on this forum. Then, voila, one of the 11.2 updates from Apple and my USB hub worked, without any change to the 3rd party's H/W. This hub is still working as expected with the 11.3 update. But who knows, maybe it won't with the next update?

I can virtually guarantee some obscure problem with the next update, just as there has been obscure problems with every update ever issues by any company that ever issued a 1.0 version of anything. It's just that Apple is bigger than most, so more people are likely to have an oddball USB hub that doesn't work.

ksaro1 wrote:

Barney - Just curious, how many tabs do you have open? I tend to have between 10-20 tabs open at any one time. I know this puts some burden on the browser and OS.

I use Chrome with about 10-15 tabs open regularly. 2016 MBP. No problems.

Barney - Just curious, how many tabs do you have open? I tend to have between 10-20 tabs open at any one time. I know this puts some burden on the browser and OS.

I only fired it up to check it out with the current OS. I didn't open more than a few pages on a single tab.

BTW - All that I've changed on my iMac recently is updating Big Sur from 11.2 to 11.3. I've not added/removed/updated any application.

I'm not sure why that makes any difference. Any system modifications you have installed in the past could be affected by the update, too.

ksaro1 wrote:

Voila! - I now find that X is working again from a terminal window. I had reported this for Big Sur in the past and now with the latest 11.3.1 update I find that what I reported as not working is now working. I wouldn't call X working on a Linux-based system obscure, FWIW,

I am unaware of X11 having been broken in Big Sur. I test it on a regular basis when people complain that it isn’t working in <insert name of most recent macOS version here>. The solution is almost always in some mailing list archive from 2003. That being said, X11 on a Mac is most definitely obscure.

What does Linux have to do with anything anyway? Are you suggesting that macOS is Linux-based? It most definitely is not. It isn’t even “based on BSD” as people often claim. It is a mongrel operating system contain parts of just about every other OS made in the last 40 years, including Windows, but notably not Linux.

I just fired up Edge and have no problems with it.

Maybe it is something else you have installed on your Mac disrupting those browsers.

I have inserted the comments in its own file here because the size was too large for the community form.