iCloud Passwords extension may slow down your browsers – a non-perfect solution

If you are like me, who uses Apple devices but also a Windows PC, and you have the iCloud Passwords extension to sync your passwords. Well, maybe you are having the same issue as described below.

I have been experiencing a slow Edge/Chrome on my Windows 11 PC, even with a fresh installation after the upgrade. Especially Youtube and GitHub, it would take me 10 seconds to go back to the home page from a video, and 1 mins to search by keywords for a repo!

I started by questioning if the AIEPlatform I was developing caused the issue, but soon it cleared the suspicion. I checked the processes, everything seemed okay. I tested my internet speed and that’s no problem.

Then, I started to turn off the extensions one by one. I turned iCloud Passwords at last because it’s developed by Apple so I felt like it shouldn’t cause this issue. But right after I disabled iCloud Passwords, Youtube and GitHub became much much faster, back to the normal speed I would expect.

I am not clear why iCloud Passwords would cause an issue, but after a Google search, I found some people had the same issue as well.

Non-perfect solution

Here is a non-perfect solution. We can give iCloud Passwords access on click (by default it’s On all sites). Then, whenever we want to use the passwords stored in iCloud, we need to click the extension icon.

Why do I call it a non-perfect solution? This is because, with this setting, the extension won’t prompt us to save/update passwords in iCloud unless we click the icon beforehand.

I have been using iCloud Passwords for months and I didn’t feel Edge was slowing down until very recently, so I am not sure if this is because of a recent update of the extension.