Huzzah!

My Mac's seemed a little sluggish lately, so tonight I purchased MacPaw's CleanMyMac (not an affiliate link, and this is not a sponsored post!) and ran it through its paces. Sudden and dramatic performance improvement, and a bonus:

After running CleanMyMac's normal 'cleaning" routine, I also used it to uninstall some applications, and I thought "hey, why not see if uninstalling and reinstalling Chrome fixes it?"

It did. Apparently I had missed a preferences file or library file or something in my manual uninstall/reinstall attempts, and this got it.

I've got my NewsSquares (among other things) back!

So: I definitely recommend CleanMyMac. Even absent the miraculous restoration of my preferred browser, it was well worth the eminently reasonable price (use coupon code "mwe12" for a 25% discount, while it lasts). Some annoying pauses have completely disappeared.