Short story: Google Chrome installs something called Keystone on your computer, which nefariously hides itself from Activity Monitor and makes your whole computer slow even when Chrome isn't running. Deleting Chrome and Keystone makes your computer way, way faster, all the time. Click here for instructions.
Long story: I noticed my brand new 16" MacBook Pro started acting sluggishly doing even trivial things like scrolling. Activity Monitor showed *nothing* from Google using the CPU, but WindowServer was taking ~80%, which is abnormally high (it should use <10% normally).
Doing all the normal things (quitting apps, logging out other users, restarting, zapping PRAM, etc) did nothing, then I remembered I had installed Chrome a while back to test a website.
I deleted Chrome, and noticed Keystone while deleting some of Chrome's other preferences and caches. I deleted everything from Google I could find, restarted the computer, and it was like night-and-day. Everything was instantly and noticeably faster, and WindowServer CPU was well under 10% again.
Then something else hit me, my family had been complaining about the sluggish performance of a 2015 iMac since practically the day we bought it. I had tried everything I could think of – it had a Fusion drive and the symptoms were consistent with a failing SSD – but drive diagnostics always turned up nothing. We even went as far as to completely wipe and set up the computer fresh multiple times.
Then I remembered, installing Chrome was always one of the first things we did when we set up the computer. I deleted Chrome, and all the files Keystone had littered on the computer, restarted, and it was so snappy it felt like a brand new computer.
Yeah, I realize this sounds like a freakin' infomercial, but it worked so well I spent $5 on a domain name and set up this website even if it makes me sound like a raving nut.
/Applications folder and drag Chrome to the Trash.
Finder click the Go menu (at the top of the screen), then click "Go to Folder...".
/Library and hit enter.
LaunchAgents, Application Support, Caches, Preferences.
Google folders, and anything else that starts with com.google... and com.google.keystone...
Go to Folder..." again.
~/Library and hit enter. (Note the "~")
LaunchAgents, Application Support, Caches, Preferences.
Google folders, and anything else that starts with com.google... and com.google.keystone...
Safari is good and it's already on your Mac. It's fast and efficient. If you need a Chromium-based browser, use Brave or Vivaldi. Firefox has pretty noticeable pointer input latency which (I, the author) am pretty nitpicky about, but other than that it's fine. (Mozilla are a bunch of short-sighted dopes for firing the Servo team. If the Servo team regroups, I'd be inclined to recommend anything they make down the road).
Wired first reported on Keystone in 2009, when Google put it into Google Earth. It has a long history of crashing Macs by doing bizarre things that shouldn't be necessary for auto-update software to function.
The fact that it hasn't been "fixed" in 11 years might mean that it's not actually broken. Why would auto-update software need to take up a massive portion of CPU on a ton's of people's computers, all while hiding itself?
To all the good people at Google who work on Chrome: something is going on between the code you're writing and what is happening on people's computers. I hope you can track it down and give us an honest postmortem.