Google Chrome is leading as the web browser of choice by many people. However it does not come without its trials and tribulations. Over the years I have waffled between Firefox and Chrome. Firefox I like because it allows for configuring through its extensive use of extensions. Chrome however has been known for memory usage issues. Malware is always something you have to be careful when browsing websites.
However the browser can slow down and crash and with the advent of Firefox switching their extensions development over to a new system some extensions may stop being developed and simply quit working.
Google Chrome and Opera browser are Chromium based with the latter now being able to use Chrome extensions. I have been using Chrome as my main browser but during the day I noticed that Chrome had a habit of slowing down to a crawl at times. This even happened with a small number, four or five tabs opened. Unlike some people I do not normally have 30+ tabs open in Chrome a lot. Using Chrome’s Task Manager (Shft+Esc). It was then I discovered that that the two Gmail accounts that I normally have opened all day long were using 784MB of RAM in the browser. Looking at the memory usage of the other tabs they were a more respectable 100MB or so.
I decided to do some further testing for a day. I may Firefox x64 52.0.1 as my main browser and opened the same tabs I had opened in Chrome. Well in Firefox the same two Gmail accounts were using a total of 174MB a huge drop from 784MB! The two gmail accounts were functioning just fine in Firefox
I went looking for an extension to add to Chrome to control memory usage of tabs and found The Great Suspender which suspends tabs after a user definable period of time. You can also white list other tabs in Chrome if you want to have those tabs not suspended. Now Chrome memory usage is back to a reasonable amount. Will also see if this helps with Chrome also slowing down on occasion.
I use an antivirus Eset’s NOD32 along with Malwarebytes Anti-malware (MBAM) real time protection. Recently I noticed that I would see these two products blocking access to malicious websites that I happen to click on via a Google search. That is fine. However what is not fine is that both Opera and Chrome browsers would initiate outbound connection to these previously blocked sites on their own. The way I discovered this was NOD32 or MBAM would popup a notification that it had blocked either Chrome.exe or Opera.exe from accessing these possible malicious websites. What is troubling is that these outbound connections are being down without my intervention and can occur days after the initial blocking occurred when I clicked on a search result link.
I first thought that perhaps Google Chrome was pre-fetching previously visited websites so I checked that setting in Chrome and discovered that option was disabled by default by UBlock Origin extension that I use as my ad blocker. I tried deleting the cache in Chrome but that did not help. The strange thing is that I have seen this behavior also occurring in Opera and on 3 different computers here. Scanning of these machines showed no virus infections. I am still investigating why these outbound connections are occurring. I have just recently clearing the browser history in case for some reason Chrome/Opera are validating websites in their history list but that did not help. Still looking for a cause for this behavoir.
If I discover what is causing this issue I will update this post.