You might have run afoul of (and are inadvertently messing with):
“Chromium uses multiple processes to protect the overall application from bugs and glitches in the rendering engine or other components. It also restricts access from each rendering engine process to other processes and to the rest of the system. In some ways, this brings to web browsing the benefits that memory protection and access control brought to operating systems.”
" We refer to the main process that runs the UI and manages renderer and other processes as the "browser process " or “browser.” Likewise, the processes that handle web content are called “renderer processes " or “renderers.” The renderers use the Blink open-source layout engine for interpreting and laying out HTML.”
You may expect to find a process running for each window, and maybe even each tab. The processes are NOT “ghosts.” (I think, but “you never know?”)
The Chromium Projects - Memory Usage Backgrounder
“https://www.chromium.org/developers/memory-usage-backgrounder/”
Multi-Process Model Background
To understand Chromium’s memory usage, let’s understand the multi-process model. Unlike other browsers, Chromium is divided into multiple processes.
When Chromium starts up, it will initially have two processes.
One process is the browser process which controls the main browser functionality, and the other is the initial renderer process , which runs the Blink rendering engine and JavaScript (V8).
Each time you open a new tab in Chromium, you’ll likely get a new renderer process.
With typical browsing, it is common to see 5-7 chrome.exe processes active.
Further, if you utilize plugins, apps, or extensions, they may also execute within independent processes.
All of Chromium’s processes, whether it is a browser process, a renderer process, or a plugin process, will show under the Task Manager as “chrome.exe”.
April 2020 - Several examples - screenshots - of:
- Brave Browser Task Manager
- Windows OS Task Manager
