I really love this add-on and it belongs to my core set of Firefox add-ons since many years.

However, since the last update two days ago, it has made Firefox almost unusable due to extreme lagging. Firefox even started showing warnings that the browser was no longer responding. Judging from the other recent reviews, this is clearly a bug.

That alone would not have made me rate it one star.

But after disabling Wappalyzer, I realized how much faster my browsing became compared to the previous months. So this is not only about the recent bug; the add-on seems to have become a serious performance drag over time.

This made me think that the core issue may not only be the current bug, but also the way the add-on performs its analysis in general. From a user perspective, the ideal solution would be an optional on-demand mode, where Wappalyzer analyzes a website only when I click the extension button.

At the same time, I understand that fully on-demand analysis may not fit Wappalyzer’s model, because the extension probably wants to collect technology statistics from visited websites. A good compromise could therefore be time-shifted automatic analysis: instead of doing the full detection immediately when a new page is opened, Wappalyzer could wait until the page has loaded, the browser is idle, or a short delay has passed.

Another good compromise could be a two-stage approach: perform only a lightweight initial scan during page load, then defer the heavier technology detection until later. That would still allow automatic detection while reducing the impact on page loading and general browsing performance.

For now, I will keep it disabled even after the current bug is fixed, and only enable it when I really need it for a specific task.

I hope the Wappalyzer team takes a serious look at performance and improves it significantly. If that happens, I will gladly increase my rating back to 5 stars.