Chromium Browsers

When I bought a new laptop a few months ago, I decided to get a new Win10. Now the default browser on Win10 is Edge, which is built upon Google’s Chromium kernel. Things went well in the beginning. I compared the usage of Edge and Chrome, and found that the former consumes less memory than the latter, and the response times were both decent. I chose to use Edge for most regular works, and added an extension for blocking ads.

Until 2 weeks ago, some weird things happened. Besides the default home page, Edge also opened another url which displays traffic-pixel in the beginning and quickly jumped to Google search engine. WHen Edge was opened on the background, the new tag of Google will randomly pop out, which is really annoying. I thought this might be a virus, even though a seemingly innocent one. However, I didn’t find anything at all by searching in Google. Then I switched to Bing, and changed a few keywords. The first result with a link to Reddit immediately caught my eye: there were some guys discussing about this 19 days ago! Under their investigation, the culprit is the Edge extension AdBlocker! Indeed when I turned it off, the auto-generated new tag never come back again. Apparently Google’s engineers did some hack into this extension because AdBlocker targets at blocking ads on YouTube.

I should be more careful about using Chromium extensions, especially on Edge. The available choices are limited on the market. Maybe the better choice is to install extensions from Chrome if I really want to.