What is the Google Chrome Helper? – All You Need to Know

When it comes to browsers, Google Chrome is crowned the undisputed king. But this king isn’t without its personality problems. Its biggest issue is memory loss, causing your internet experience to slow down to a crawl, and your PC to freeze. This usually happens due to a little something called “Google Chrome Helper.”

Bring up your Activity Monitoring menu and you’ll see it lurking there. It’ll sometimes bring a couple of friends, just to make sure your RAM is outnumbered and outclassed.

Some instances of this hungry fiend may even lead to losses of half a Gigabyte of RAM memory.

So, what is Google Chrome Helper exactly, and why is it making your life hard?

Checking the official Chrome FAQ nets the same results as consulting your own Chrome browser, and that is a big, steamy pile of nothingness. After doing our research, we eventually found out that Chrome Helper is the general name of all embedded content running outside your browser. In other words, browser plug-ins such as AdBlock Plus.

When you install AdBlock Plus, its functionality doesn’t come from within Chrome itself but rather from external servers. And Chrome Helper is the interface that mediates the transport of data from those external serves into your browser’s embed code. As default, Google Chrome Helper is set to run automatically.

Plugins vastly extend the functionality of Google Chrome, and we couldn’t do without them. But do we really have to accept being haunted by Chrome Helper’s ravenous hunger toward PC resources? No, we don’t!

Can you turn off Google Chrome Helper?
Disabling Chrome Helper is indeed possible. But doing so requires you to go down deeper into Chrome’s settings. We’ll take it step by step so you know exactly how to save your PC from being frozen like an icicle every now and then:

With Google Chrome opened, click the three vertical dots in the top-right corner of your screen, and select “Settings”

2. Select the “Privacy and security tab” from the left menu. If it’s not there, click on “Advanced” and then select it.

3. Scroll down until you find “Unsandboxed plugin access” and uncheck it

This is how to easily disable Google Chrome Helper on Windows. But what about Mac? Can you do the same there? Indeed, you can, but the steps are a bit different. To disable it on Mac, there are two methods you can try:

You can use the Terminal Command. Once you open it, write down the following command – “killall Google/Chrome/ Helper”, without the quotation marks. This will terminate all background processed related to Google Chrome Helper, effectively boosting up your system.
You can reset your browser settings to escape Chrome’s adjutant. Resetting it to default configurations should do the trick. As with Windows Chrome, click on the three vertical dots on your Chrome browser, and go to “Settings.” There, select “Advanced.”
At the bottom of the screen, you should see an option intuitively called “Restore Settings to Their Original Defaults.” Click on it, and then click on the “Reset Settings” prompt that appears. After a few seconds, the browser will resent and Google Chrome Helper will be gone.

After unchecking the “Unsandboxed plugin access” or “Plug-ins” options from running automatically, Chrome should ask you for permission before playing any Flash, Java, DivX, Quicktime, or Silverlight content on any site, instead of automatically loading and playing it. Until you decide to play it, the content will be grayed-out.

Do I have to keep closing Google Chrome Helper every time?
On Windows Chrome, no. After you’re done with the step-by-step process described above, Chrome Helper will no longer slow down your browser or PC. The option is permanently turned off until you decide to turn it back on. Why would you, though? It’s not like this “helper” actually does anything helpful.


On Mac, the problem is a bit thorny. Every time you boot up a new website with fresh content and plug-ins on it, Google Helper will boot up again. And resetting your browser settings nets the same result after some time. The only way you could permanently erase Google Chrome Helper from the world is by using iMyFone Umate Mac Cleaner.

This bad boy right here:


After pressing on “Start Now” and “Deactivate Heavy Consumers”, you’ll see Google Chrome Helper there. There’s a handy “Deactivate” button next to it, so press it as soon as possible before the little bugger decides to escape your clutches.

What if my browser is still slow after terminating Google Chrome Helper?
If that’s the case, then you’re wrestling with a whole other monster. The number one reason why your Chrome browser may still be slow even after dealing with Google Chrome Helper is the mind-boggling number of unnecessary tabs in your Task Manager.

Just open up Task Manager, locate Google Chrome, and have a look at what it says in the brackets (there should be a number corresponding to the number of tabs).

Here, for instance, there are a whopping 41 opened tabs, which eat up 1.7GB of memory. But there’s a catch here. The number of Chrome tabs in Task Manager doesn’t realistically correspond to opened tabs in your browser.

You may only have 5 tabs, and Task Manager would show 12 Chrome processes. That’s because every Chrome tab has other background processes active simultaneously. If the problem persists after closing the unnecessary tabs, you may want to:

Close down unnecessary extensions (vertical dots > More Tools > Extensions > Toggle off the extension).

Enable Chrome’s prediction service that speeds up page loading times by going to “Settings”, typing “prediction” in the search bar, navigating to “Use a prediction service to load pages more quickly”, and turning it on. Then, restart Chrome.

Clear the browser data such as cache and history data. Press “Ctrl+Shift+Delete” on your keyboard, establish a time range, check all items on the Advanced tab, and then press “Clear Data.” Then, reopen Chrome.

Check for Chrome malware by going to “Settings”, typing “reset” in the search bar, and then clicking “Clean up computer”. Then, click the “Find” button right beside the “Find and remove harmful software” option. If Chrome finds anything, click “Remove” when asked.

This should solve most if not all our slowness problems on Chrome even after closing down Google Chrome Helper. If you encounter any other issues, leave a comment down below!