Google Chrome Feature of the Day: Nerd Mode

If you do a lot of research on the Web you've probably come to depend in the tab feature of Firefox - now widely copied in other browsers.  But if you open a lot of tabs you've probably also seen your machine slow down to the point it becomes almost unusable.  The Windows Task Manager shows the CPU is close to 100% used, but the only thing you can do is kill the browser and start over.

Now Google Chrome as addressed the problem with its very own task manager.  Just open the "Control the current page" menu and select Developer>Task Manager.  Or hit SHIFT+ESC if you are in a hurry.  The resulting window shows each task and how much memory, CPU, and bandwidth it is using.  There's even a "stats for nerds" that shows the process ID and memory breakdown.

The culprit usually turns out to be the Flash plug-in, which consume more than half of the CPU even when the offending pages are not on screen.  One wonders if this discovery will cause more people to use FlashBlock.

Comments

[Mark Waks]

Yeah, this is the main reason why I'm doing my morning blog trawl in Chrome instead of Firefox. I'm in a browser all day, but when I'm doing development it's in a small number of predictable sites. The morning surf takes me all over the Web, though, and that can chew both CPU and memory quite steadily -- it's not unusual for it to bring Firefox to its knees within a few days with all the leftover junk. So the ability to kill the offending bits is likely to be quite helpful, and means that I don't have so much random junk cluttering my development Firefox process.

In general, Chrome's multi-process architecture is its most important feature: the ability to build the Task Manager is one good consequence of that. But it does underscore the notion that the browser is becoming an OS unto itself, even more than we used to joke about Emacs being one. I do wonder how long it'll be before someone builds a laptop that simply boots Chrome, with just a kernel underneath -- the absolutely pure webtop is starting to look practical...