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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You can just enable/disable the extension with a toggle. There doesn’t seem to be any reason to ever use the extension though since you can click through from the website.
Having the extension activated is what gets you all the targeted offers via email based on your browsing habits that don’t show up when going directly to the website.
Stephen are you on a Mac or a PC? I don’t have this issue on my mac but it sounds like this isn’t an issue for all users anyway.
I’m on a PC.
My laptop kept shutting down when the HDMI cable was plugged in and I was using Claude AI to diagnose . As part of the troubleshooting, I had a screenshot of Chrome uploaded and Claude noticed in the screenshot my extensions and it said, “it looks like you have the Capital One Shopping extension loaded, which has been known to cause this issue, disable it until needed, and the problem should go away”. It was exactly right. Turned that extension off and never had the problem again.
@Stephen – you can always open an incognito window and use Gmail there, it will automatically disable all the extensions
Even after uninstalling it over a year ago I was still having problems so had to call Apple support for them to remove all traces of it.
@Stephen: Use the Email Client THUNDERBIRD from Mozilla. Handles many email accounts at the same time without using the browser. No slowdown no matter the things you have installed in your browser. I have 11 email accounts and it checks them all at the same time and I can handle all my emails very efficiently. I’ve been using it for many many years.
Capital One Shopping extension is huge security issue. Capital One is in the business to watch everything you do online. No privacy anymore.
I personally don’t trust these types of extensions to access all my browsing, so I only use them in a separate “Shopping” profile. I can do all my research in my main profile, and then switch when I’m about to purchase.
If you prefer to use a single profile, and are comfortable with technical tasks, it looks like you can set up a Chrome Enterprise policy under ExtensionSettings for the extension id with the key: “runtime_blocked_hosts” and a value similar to “*://mail.google.com”. That should block that extension from running in Gmail.
If it’s set up properly, you should see the policy listed under the extension under at “chrome://policy/”.
The documentation for ExtensionSettings is here: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/9867568
While this is designed for Chrome installs in companies and organizations, it is possible to apply it to your personal Chrome profile. I’m not going to describe how to do it, since it is somewhat technical and the method are different depending on the OS. Instructions are available through a web search.
Alternatively, you can change the permissions of the extension to only work on specific sites, and remember to add sites as you shop.
Great information. For me there seems to be so many advantages of going the multiple profiles route that I’m not tempted to mess with extension settings. I like that I can set up shopping extensions in their own profiles and thus I don’t have to worry about which one is stealing the click. And I have no plans to allow Capital One Shopping or any other shopping extension access to my main browsing sessions.
The catch with your route is that you’re not giving it your shopping behavior and therefore it won’t send the extremely lucrative offers we often get. Like 20-30% back on various stores. Those primarily come in via email 30 minutes to 2 days after visiting a site.
On the flip side, Jake, I only use the profile with the extension installed when I want to browse a site where I hope to get an elevated offer. I actually prefer not to give Capital One Shopping access to all of my shopping — like if I need to buy a trail camera for a relative as a gift as a one-off purchase, I don’t really need Capital One to send me a bunch of offers for Cabela that I’m not going to use (just a made up example), so I prefer to only “shop” in that browser when I want to trigger a targeted offer for a specific merchant or type of merchant. There are lots of things I might look up that I don’t care to let Capital One see. In essence, I want to decide which things I think are relevant for them.
I think you might be misunderstanding the suggested approach to using multiple profiles. The idea is to switch to the Capital One Shopping profile specifically when you want to trigger an offer, and use a different profile for everything else. That way you can control what information Capital One Shopping gets. Actually it can increase the utility of the targeted offers because you are only feeding it stores where you can use the offers and are unlikely to get offers that aren’t useful. Also, it means you can time the offers to show up when you need them. I have had very good luck getting some outstanding targeted offers using this approach.
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Extensions are not profile-specific.
Are you sure? When I switch profiles I see different extensions.
Without John’s fix, Capital One is either on in all profiles, or off in all profiles. Some extentions (e.g Malwarebytes) have a property to make their behaviour site-specific.
Capital One Shopping only shows up in specific profiles for me. It might be because I haven’t enabled sync through Chrome on them. I notice that if I enable sync then it picks up all my default extensions.
@L3 again: I only have the extension installed in the profile where I do my shopping, it’s not in the Chrome profile I’m using as I type this. And I have extensions installed here in this profile that are not installed in the profile where C1 Shopping is installed.
You should really not comment about things you don’t know about.
If using Safari, you can install a webpage as a web app then disable/enable whatever extensions you want for that app.
Whoa! You’re a star – that totally fixed it in the best possible way. Thank you so much – I’ll add that to the post.
OK, I thought I’d sorted it out, but it just seems like I’d turned off the Capital One Shopping extension for all sites—not just Gmail—after following the first couple of steps. When going to my Gmail tab and toggling off Capital One Shopping, it seems to carry that over to all other sites; is there a way to toggle it off so that it remains off for Gmail, but nowhere else?
It appears it only allows disabling/enabling all extensions per site. Disable “Allow extensions on mail.google.com”
Where is this located? I’m getting the similar to Stephen – turns it off for all sites. Possible to just disable on mail.google.com?
In the same extension menu there should be a toggle on top that says “Allow extensions on…”
This worked! Now my Gmail is lightning fast. Extension still works on all other sites too.
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.
No need to log out. In Chrome, click on the jigsaw piece-looking button in the toolbar and then click the three dots to the right of the Capital One Shopping listing and select ‘Manage Extension’. At the top of there, you’ll see a switch to turn it off without needing to log out or uninstall.
thanks!
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.
Haven’t dug into the code, but pretty sure poor coding. I’ve watched how extensions load in dev tools and looked at the popovers of several off the shopping extensions, there all kinda a mess. So much tracking stuff.
Topcashback at one point was interfering with my password manager.
Separate profiles is by far the easiest approach