Microsoft Autofill has a big optimization problem

Brass Contributor

First of all, sorry for posting this here but from all the 120 Microsoft Tech Community hubs this it's the closest one to the Microsoft Autofill extension.

 

The extension is fully broken from head to toe, the most noticeable problem is the high resources use.

 

I compared the extension on fair conditions with the two more popular alternatives, Lastpass and Bitwarden, and Microsoft Autofill's performance is far behind other services.

 

The tests were made on clean installations of Brave, Edge Beta, Chrome, and Chromium, also all the extensions had the same number of credentials in order to get more accurate results. After several tests, the Bitwarden and LastPass performance were very similar, between 60 and 80 MB of ram usage and almost null CPU usage. 

 

Average MS Autofill RAM usage is over 260 MB and can reach 300MB, CPU usage randomly increases up to 100%.

 

The MS extension also has another big annoying problem, it suddenly stops working. When this happens, the credentials from saved sites don't show, the extension logo on the browser bar turns grey instead of blue, it's natural color. If you try to open the vault the extension simply won't respond.

 

All the problems aforementioned occur in the 1.0.0 initial release and the 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 patches. 

 

My browser crashed once while I was writing this post.

 

 

 

 

3 Replies

I've seen the same problem. Microsoft Edge Auto Fill takes 30-40% of CPU, my laptop gets very hot ... 
@AleQC 

@wizmagister 100% CPU usage at times for me on Chrome. When it happens, it last several minutes

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Nice post, thanks for sharing your findings.
I use autofill as an extension in edge (because I want to use passwords from a different account) and I never experienced any crashes. But I'll monitor the resource usage.

As you mention in your post as well. It would be very cool if there would be a dedicated hub for Microsoft Autofill, a Roadmap and a UserVoice channel to see user-topics and the way dev team is handling it.