I have formatted and reinstalled my i5 PC a few months ago. A while ago, browsing became very slow. I can't remember installing any special browser addons, but it could be since I download a lot of stuff.
How can I find out what's slowing down the browser? I have purchased AVG antivirus which didn't find anything abnormal.
Here's a few things to try
Asside from the obvious system maint. issues like defrag and chkdsk, anything else could be up in the air such as your router, ISP, and other network factors.
Something useful to check would be if this slowness is happening in any other browsers. Try downloading Firefox and seeing if browsing is slow in that browser. If not, you at least know your problem is probably limited to Chrome.
I would try clearing all browsing history and cookies (and other information) in Chrome by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Delete and checking all of the options that appear. Also check to make sure that you didn't accidentally/inadvertently install any new addons.
Lastly, I would try disabling all of your addons and seeing if that helps, if it does you can start selectively turning them back on to figure out which one is causing the trouble, maybe one of them had a bad update!
PS: People have been complaining lately that the latest release of Chrome is having some issues. I have heard about crashes in particular but maybe the problems are manifesting themselves as slowness on your setup.
I just reran in Chrome and it downloaded as as fast as the others. I think the only change I had made was to disable and re-enable AVG. I was prompted by the previous reply so tried with AVG disabled; fast. I didn't want to leave AVG disabled, so re-enabled. Still fast.
It is odd that AVG only affected Chrome. Whoops, no, retested with IE and all went well. Safari still misbehaving.
