For the past couple of years or so, my Gmail account has been painfully slow on desktop in my Chrome browser. When clicking on an email, it’ll usually take a second or two to open. Clicking to delete the email or move it to a folder takes another second or two to process each action, so moving an email to a folder can take five seconds or more when it should only take a second or two.
That might not sound like a long time each time, but it feels like forever, especially considering I like to stay on top of my inbox and so I keep it pretty well organized. Not to mention that I can be fairly impatient about that kind of thing.
Well, it seems that I’ve discovered the culprit: Capital One Shopping.
I’d finally gotten so sick of how slowly Gmail was running that I googled “Why is desktop gmail so slow” this afternoon. One of the top results was this Reddit thread.
The description of their problem pretty much identically matches my frustrations, but it was the update in the final paragraph that caught my eye:
This has been something I have noticed in the last month or so, and I think it has been going on even longer to be honest. Whenever I log on to GMail from any windows desktop (either my work laptop or my home gaming PC), there is a general lag to the entire service. From clicking between tabs (primary –> promotions –> social for example) or just in-between clicks in general (clicking the back arrow or clicking on an email), there is a general pause and lag to each action. Sometimes it will take seconds before I can even click again with my cursor.
I do not think computer processing power is the issue, as especially for my home PC it can basically run anything it wants with no issue. Is this something that happens a lot to people or is there a clear fix I am completely missing? I tried to see if there were any prior threads on this but didn’t seem to find much. Thanks in advance.
[EDIT] Thank you all for the comments offering all kinds of useful advice. I found two different solutions here. The first was to use a different browser. Opening GMail in Microsoft Edge made me realize just how slow and choppy it was on Chrome. If you would like to stay on Chrome, disable the CapitalOne Shopping extension. For some reason, that slows down things so much.
That final sentence struck fear into my heart due to the potential implications. To test it out, I turned off the Capital One Shopping extension (without actually uninstalling it from Chrome), then refreshed the tab where I have my Gmail account open.
Sure enough, all of a sudden it was lightning quick. Clicking on an email opened it immediately. Clicking the ‘Move to’ button immediately opened the dropdown list, while typing the first few letters of a folder name filtered it straight away. Hitting enter moved the email in an instant. What would normally cause me to wait after each step had no lag whatsoever.
After enjoying its speed, I turned the Capital One Shopping extension back on. After refreshing the Gmail tab again, it was back to its usual slow self. Sigh.
That means I have four (or possibly five) potential solutions to this, all of which are non-ideal:
- Keep the extension installed and suffer slow Gmail.
- Move the extension to a different browser and have to remember to switch browsers any time I’m searching for products online in the hope that I’ll get targeted emails from Capital One Shopping. This would require completely changing my browsing behavior.
- Use Gmail in a different browser. This would be a pain as I already use Edge for a different Gmail account and Firefox for another one, not to mention that it’d be a pain to switch back and forth between browsers any time I wanted to look at my email.
- Uninstall the Capital One Shopping extension and forgo all the incredibly generous targeted offers that get emailed to me.
- I think a fifth solution might be to create a different Chrome profile that I log in to my Gmail account on, but which doesn’t have the extension installed. That would require remembering to do that each day rather than defaulting to my regular Chrome profile without thinking.
Ultimately, all of the solutions suck in some way, but option five might be the least painful all things considered.
Anyway, I wanted to share this quirk in case a slow Gmail account has been something you’ve been contending with and you too have the Capital One Shopping extension installed.
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when you say you turned the extension do you mean logged out? or do i have to actually remove it from my laptop. i don’t have the shopping extension but do for travel and my gmail has also gotten absurdly slow.
I do as Nick has suggested and use a different browser profile just for Capital One Shopping. In fact I have multiple Chrome profiles for various extensions so they don’t interfere with each other and I always know which extension is getting the click. I use Brave with uBlock Origin as my main browser, which does some handy things like blocking sponsored items on Amazon and sponsored (and possibly scam) Google search results. Once I am ready to shop for a specific item I pulled up the relevant browser instance. It is a tad bit of extra work but it gives me a lot more control.
I’ve been wondering what was causing this for months!! I turned cap 1 off right now and it fixed it. Amazing, what a bummer though.
Any idea why this chrome extension causes Gmail to be slow?
Probably nothing good. They are basically reading your email.