Google Chrome Feature of the Day: Each Tab Is A Process

One of the most important features of Google Chrome is under the hood: each tab runs in its own process.  As Scott McCloud describes in his excellent comic book, previous web browsers ran everything in one thread - rendering the page, plug-ins, and javascript.  In the old days before tabs and complicated AJAX applications this wasn't a big deal, but now a problem with one page can make everything in the browser unusable.  This can be a major inconvenience if you happen to be in the middle of editing a long on-line document or involved in an e-commerce transaction.  Also, with the browser becoming the main focus of one's computing activity, it is more common to leave the browser running all day as one visits hundreds of web sites.  With everything running in one process, memory becomes increasingly fragmented until things slow to a crawl.

Chrome puts each tab in its own process and starts a new process each time you go to a new web site. While this approach consumes a little more time and memory at the beginning, it is more efficient in the long run.  It also means that if there are problems in one tab, the rest of them can continue on their merry way, and it's easier to indentify the culprit, such as a misbehaving plug-in, illustrated at right.

As Mark Waks points out in a comment to a previous post, this brings us closer to the day when the browser becomes the computing platform.

Comments

[Dave deBronkart]

I know this is an older post but I just found it. Dude, thanks, because I never realized the problem inherent in my sometimes have 25 tabs open in Firefox. (Seriously.)