Grammarly Extension for Mac
A Buggy Mess!
Since February this year, I have had a Grammarly premium membership, and the tool has been utterly remarkable. The Ai Smart checking features have corrected me several times, whether it is a incorrect spelling, passive voice, hard to read sentences and much more. In fact, I am using it right now to check for mistakes in this article. Well, the web-app at least.
I have been waiting a really long time to tell you this hilarious story. Let’s rewind back to October so that I can narrate it to you.
Friday, Oct 1
This was the day when I was proofreading my first article on Medium I got a brilliant idea of using Grammarly to proofread my work. So, I went to Grammarly’s website and noticed that they had released an extension for Safari. It could be used on any platform, such as Google Docs and other editors.
I went to the App Store and installed the Safari extension for Mac, and then got back to editing my blog.
Grammarly was actively checking my sentences, punctuations and all the other good stuff it does. The day went on, and I went about my day as usual. In the evening, at around 5:00 pm, I was watching a YouTube video when I noticed that my iMac was acting really slow and buggy(acting wildly when I was swiping between pages). I quickly launched activity monitor to see the RAM usage on the computer.
At that time, I only had 4–5 Safari tabs open(Nike.com, Adidas.com, Apple.com, YouTube.com, geeksforgeeks.com), nothing much. The moment I opened Activity Monitor, I could see my Memory Pressure Meter in yellow. This meant that the RAM usage was moderately high. I was using about 3 GB of swap(unusual, because my iMac has 16 Gigs of RAM, and only 5 tabs were open).
Adidas.com using 3.6 GB, Nike.com was using 3.2 GB, GeeksforGeeks using 2 GB and Apple.com using 1.4 GB.
E-commerce webpages such as Nike, Adidas, and Apple generally do not use more than 800 MB of RAM. Still, I saw literally shocking numbers that day. The 3 E-commerce websites were accumulating up to 8.2 GB of RAM(give or take). I quit Safari, and the RAM issue seemed to be resolved. It didn’t seem like it would annoy me again the same day.
Saturday, Oct 2
The night before, I had opened Brainly.com to find an answer to a math question. Like any “normal” person would do, I had left that web page on Safari throughout the night. The next day I woke up, not expecting anything unusual on my Mac, obviously. I had thought that I had fixed the issue the previous day, but it was wrong!
Brainly.com was taking an exorbitant 88 GB of RAM! My memory pressure was in red, and the first thing I did was to force quit safari.
I was startled at what had just commenced. 88 GB was massive . I quickly searched online to find out the reason for a huge memory leak in Safari. It said the webpage might have mining scripts that could be running in the background.
This website was an E-learning website, so mining scripts would obviously not be the issue.
A critical detail I forgot to mention at the beginning of this article is that I was running macOS Monterey Beta 8. I thought at first that this problem was with Safari, as Apple had added a new UI design to make It look aesthetically pleasing. They had also added new tab group so as to be quick and efficient in swiping between web pages, and keep all tabs organised.
So I switched to Chrome. Something I haven’t done for over a year. Chrome, as we know, is also a memory hog; but I knew that it would take nowhere close to the tremendous amount of RAM that Safari was using.
Well, here I was, staring at the Chrome start page:
Apple had their own bug reporting software for beta versions of macOS Monterey, so I wrote to them regarding the memory leak on Safari. Using Chrome was OK; I installed the Grammarly extension on Chrome and edited my articles as usual.
Sunday, Oct 3
This was the day when I finally found out the truth. So, I switched back to Safari to check it out one last time before shutting the door forever(well, at least until macOS Monterey was properly released).
Right then, an unusual thought hit me!
These problems on Safari started the day I had installed the Grammarly Extension for Safari. Could all these problems be because of it?
Well, for the people anticipating what I’m going to say, wait no more:
Grammarly was the problem!
No mining scripts, and no problem with Safari in beta mode. Grammarly was the culprit. The moment I removed Grammarly from the active extensions in Safari, the memory leak seemed to be resolved; YAY! I dug out further as to why this was happening. There were no answers on the internet about anything like this. Still, I speculated that this could be because of Apple’s new Image to Text recognition software.
The images that were on the web pages were continuously being checked by the Grammarly editor. These were creating thousands of lines of code per second and writing it onto the webpage’s javascript file. This led to unnecessary RAM usage on the Mac. Well, I could still use the universal app that is available for Mac on the App Store!
Conclusion
Since then, I have not re-installed Grammarly as a web extension on my computer and rather use it as a universal App on my Mac instead. It’s a great tool that is extremely helpful in writing blogs, and I sincerely hope that they have resolved the issue!
Thanks for reading this article, and for reaching the end!
