How to Use Chrome Built in Task Manager

Chrome manages its System Resources differently than other browsers. Its V8 JavaScript engine was developed from scratch by Google and improves the user experience for heavily scripted websites and applications. Chrome takes a sandboxing-based approach to Web security. Each extension and open website runs as its process, which helps prevent malicious code from one page to affect other pages or the computer operating system.

But that said, a web browser so powerful and useful, needs a lot of system resources and processes, so, a task manager was needed to view and control any running processes.

When newer versions of the Chrome browser were built, the ability to create a new process for every open window, open tab and extension were given to it. This architecture is very helpful as the crashing of one tab or extension would not affect the other processes. If an extension or tab malfunctions or fails to work, you can disable it using an integrated Chrome Task Manager.

But why use Chrome task manager, not Windows Task Manager or Mac Activity Monitor? When we use Windows Task Manager or Mac Activity monitor to view and manage each chrome process or website, we will see many google chrome Helpers, not each web link page. So, we don’t know which page uses a lot of computer memory.

Moreover, it was revealed recently that Chrome users can use Chrome Task Manager to discover Crypto-Miners that run on websites or in extensions

How to Use Chrome Task Manager

However occasionally, you may notice Chrome lagging or acting strangely, and you don’t know which tab or extension is the culprit. Or a webpage may freeze and you want to use Chrome Task Manager to end its process.

Step 1: Launch the Chrome Task Manager

1. Open Chrome browser.
2. Select the Chrome menu button at the upper right corner of the browser window, three vertically aligned dots are the menu.
3. When the drop-down menu appears, move to the More tools option and Click Task Manager. It may take a moment to load, especially if the system is under high load.
4. Following Keyboard shortcuts could be used for opening the Task Manager:
   Shift + Esc for Windows.
   Search + Esc for Chrome OS

   

5. .Alternatively, to access Chrome’s task manager, open Chrome and Right Click on the blank tabs area the top of the screen.
6. Select Task Manager from the drop-down menu.

Step 2: Understand Task Manager Interface

All open sites, loaded extensions, and internal Chrome processes such as the browser or GPU process will be shown in the task manager. Memory Use and Footprint, CPU and Network use, and the Process ID are displayed by default in Chrome’s Task Manager.

Icons appear next to each Task in the Chrome Task Manager window. A Regular Chrome Icon represents the task that manages all of Chrome’s windows and tabs. Close this task if you want to stop all browser processes. Other icons represent processes such as Renderers, Plug-Ins, Extensions, and Graphical Processing Unit. Process Types can be identified by looking for keywords in the Task column e.g. to locate the “Tab” process look for the word “Tab” in the column of Task. You can add more than over 20 Categories of Stats as new columns.

1. Right-click a Task and a context menu will appear with a full list of available stats to choose from shared memory, private memory, image cache, script cache, CSS cache, SQLite memory and JavaScript memory and more.

   

2. Click on any of the categories in the list of Additional Categories to add them to Task Manager. Categories that have a Checkmark next to them are already displayed. If you want to remove a specific stat, click on the category and ensure the checkmark is removed.
3. You can Sort specific Columns by clicking on a Heading e,g. clicking on the Memory Footprint column, the process consuming up the most memory will be sorted to the top of the list.

   

4. Click on it again to put the process using up the least amount of memory at the top of the list.

   

5. Double-click in Task Column in the name of a Tab, Extension, or Subframe in Task Manager, and Chrome will send you directly to the tab. Remember that clicking on an extension, you will be taken to the settings page.

Step 3: End Troublesome Processes

Any of The Processes could be ended from this menu which is helpful when an extension or tab is problematic.

1. Click on the process that you want to end and then click “End Process.”

   

2. To kill more than one process at a time hold down the Shift or Ctrl key (Command on Mac), highlighting multiple items from the list, and then hit the “End Process” button.
   

   Bonus: To Discover Crypto-Miners

   Mining scripts cause High CPU Usage but other scripts or activities can also raise CPU or memory usage e.g. if you play a video on YouTube or play a browser game, or if you visit a site that uses cutting-edge features such as animations then CPU usage can increase but there is a basic difference that as you engage actively on these sites whereas mining scripts Don’t Prompt you for using your processor to mine crypto-currencies.

   1. Sort Chrome Task Manager by CPU and The process that is using the most CPU is usually the culprit.
   2. Switch to that process by double-clicking on it.
   3. Open the Developer Tools by pressing F12. and Switch to the Network tab.
   4. Reload the web page.
   5. Under Network Click on the JS Filter to list only JavaScript files.
   6. Go through the list of domains and file names to find the existence of any Crypto-Mining Script.
   7. If there is a script, close the tab and install a browser extension to deal with mining scripts such as uBlockOrigin or a Mining Blocking Extension.