Serious savings indeed when the Javascript cryptominer some ad network blithely serves up is ad-blocker'd, but we prefer synthetic benchmarks.

In seriousness, though, this is an issue. Elsewhere, I observe arguments about eg userbenchmark rankings, and the comparative relevance of single-core vs multicore performance. Are you playing a game, or rendering video 24/7 -- or running some entirely synthetic workload that allows for a peak performance the real world would never achieve? Same kinda problem.

Not sure if this is related, but Chrome on my Macbook regularly gets to a state where one process (a tab?) is consuming 4 Gb RAM and 20%+ CPU. This happens on both M1 and Intel CPUs, on multiple releases of OS.

Situation seems to happen some time after visiting ad-heavy sites (yeah I know I should install an ad-blocker). Have others noticed this? Seems to be Chrome. I also use Firefox and occasionally Safari but have not noticed that with those browsers.

Web browser benchmarks are typically designed to track real-world applications