Using the Task Manager in Chrome Browser
Posted on 28. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey in Tutorials
Many who use Chrome Browser do not even realize that in itself it has a Task Manager, much like the one that the future Chrome operating system will eventually use. But why would a browser have a Task Manager? Well, Chrome operates a bit differently that other browsers. Instead of occupying one process that takes a huge amount of system memory, Chrome separates tabs as single processes. This is different, yet has some ingenuity to it.
One of the reasons for this is because of security. Being able to lock down each tab as a single process ensures that malware or spyware does not have as much capability to infect the entire browser or system. Another reason is stability. Many of you have probably experienced a crash in Chrome, but that crash only affected a certain tab because it is set up as its own “sandboxed” process.
I could go on with the virtues of this, but let’s just take a look at Task Manager. While in Chrome, go ahead and hit Shift+Esc and you’ll see something like this:
I’ve expanded this out just to show everything here. It’s easy to tell that I like to have a lot of tabs open; the reality is that I do the majority of my work within the browser environment – so you can understand why I may be interested in Chrome OS. Anyways you can see here that every window I have open is in is own separate process. Should you have the desire, or are dealing with a buggy/unresponsive tab, you can kill it by highlighting one of the tabs and hitting “End Process”.
Even as a browser, Chrome is like an operating system in and of itself. If you look on the bottom left hand side you can see that I have highlighted the “Stats for nerds” link. When you click on this, you get a tab that expands upon the initial window:
Note how from here you can get detailed names for each process, whether they are a tab or and extension and the process ID. On the right hand side there are corresponding columns that give you memory information:
You can see what amount of memory a tab is using on its own, as well as what is shared, and the entire total. You can also see what kind of virtual memory a process is using. This has been well thought out with developers in mind and the fact that this is in the browser shows that the Google folks have been prepping this for the operating system environment for some time. Also, being able to drill down like this offers an element of information and security that no other browser has to offer.
One interesting thing I would like to note is the amount of memory that Flash requires to run. Sure, its being used in some of the pages I have open (YouTube), but you can see now that Google wants to go the operating system route why they want to move to open standards to replace Flash:
Compare that with the other processes I have running above and it’s clear – Flash is a resource hog. And with more media and interactivity on the way, expect to see more third party plugins as well as some Chrome extensions get scrutinized. With this task manager it is much easier to break down particular processes in a browser as opposed to the way other browsers simply lump everything into on giant memory allocation on a system.
So bust out the task manager when you get a chance. You might learn something interesting about the memory that pages you go to on a day to day basis require from your system. That goes the same for plugins and extensions as well.
