When I run Google Chrome Dev I find that it opens 18 chrome.exe instances as shown in Process Explorer. Beta and Stable seem to open a few less but still a bunch. Is this a result of portableizing or does the regular install do this too? After an hour or so my computer seems to get real sloooow but not sure whether to blame that on Chrome or Win7.
-----Paul-----
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This is by design in Chrome. Each tab opens at least one instance.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Would you say you had about 18 tabs open at the time?
Chromium-based browsers run each tab as it's own process, which is one of the reasons it appears to be more responsive than other browsers like Firefox that run each window as a separate process.
Active extensions run in their own process, too. The individual processes are sandboxes so 1 bad tab/window/extension can't crash the whole browser. You would see the same behavior if you ran regular Chrome or Chromium.
It's a feature. In Firefox, if a tab or web page crashes, it hangs the entire browser. In Chrome, if the same case occurs, it only crashes that one tab.
The disadvantage of this, is that Chrome will use more memory total due to what's needed to create each process (Firefox 7+ uses significantly less memory than Chrome).
This is actually not true. Since roughly Firefox 4, all plugins have been moved to plugin-container.exe and run inside there. Tabs still run in the main Firefox process though.
As for Chrome, I ran testing of my own last month, and loading up Chrome and just simply launching gmail required 6 chrome.exe processes. This is normal behavior.