Pinewood Technology Notice
Google Chrome Users
Something Wicked This Way Comes
We have seen a rise in issues with Google Chrome in the last month or so. The primary symptom is getting excessive amounts of “the color spinning ball” on your computer (also called the spinning beachball of death). When this happens, your computer is unresponsive for a bit until the spinning ball goes away. Sometimes it doesn’t.
There are several reasons this could be happening, not all limited to Chrome. The first thing to do, as always, is to restart your computer.
Troubleshooting Steps
Steps for a possible quick resolution:
- Restart your computer (even if you restarted recently) – Trust me, just do it.
- Quit Chrome and try Firefox or Safari.
- Close some tabs (possibly a lot of them).
If yout are interested, here is more in-depth information and tools that may help…
Google Chrome
Chrome is a fine web browser. There was a time, many years ago, when Pinewood IT told you to use Chrome. That might have been true back then. It is no longer the case. If you like Chrome, by all means, keep using it. I am not advocating you switch your go-to web browser.
There are a small handful of Googily tools it works best for. Run of the mill usage of Google Drive, Gmail, Docs, and such works great in both Safari and Firefox. I seldom use Chrome. I use Safari for almost everything and have not had problems. I also use Firefox and Chrome. I use each tool for different reasons. When one is giving me trouble, I try a different browser.
Google Pages not Behaving
We have seen Google docs and sheets pages not behave well. Some pages seem to eat up more memory the longer they are left open. Sometimes this has to do with rouge ads running on the page, but we have also seen it in many Google Docs.
One teacher had the sub list open at all times, and we found that page slowly eats up the computer memory until the entire computer grinds to a halt. We would close that tab, and the computer came back to life. Just be aware of this.
Google Chrome Helper
A background process (also called a daemon) is code that runs on your computer to perform tasks or functions. Your computer has quite a lot of these running at all times in its Random Access Memory (RAM). Think of RAM as the amount of space a computer has to fill its mind with what it is thinking about at that moment.
There is a process that Chrome spawns for every open tab and every extension you have installed called Google Chrome Helper. These are not bad things; they are normal. However, we have seen in the last month or so that the Google Chrome Helper can go crazy. There are a lot of reasons for this, sloppy software development on the part of Google or a Chrome extension developer, bad coding on a webpage or numerous other reasons.
The result is that Google Chrome Helper has been going wild and taking both Chrome and laptops down with it. I found one instance of Chrome helper using over 4.5GB of memory. In your old computers, that is over half of the RAM in the system. It is way more than it should be.
There is an app on your computer called Activity Monitor. It lives in your Applications folder in a subfolder called Utilities. If you open it, you can see all of the Daemons running on your system and how much memory they are using. You can also use it to see what is consuming your computer’s battery.
1. Click the three dots in the top right within Chrome
2. Choose More Tools
3. Choose Task Manager
But My Chrome Tabs!!!!
The number one reason I hear for not restarting a computer is due to the open tabs that people do not want to lose. There are Chrome extensions that can help you. The one I like best for tab management is called Session Buddy. I have been using it for years. It allows you to not only save your open tabs from multiple Chrome windows, but you can also save tab groups.
For example, if you are teaching a lesson on Shakespeare or The Roman Empire or some other unit, you can save a group of tabs and reuse them year after year. You can add or remove tabs from those saved groups.
There are other tab managers for Chrome. I highly suggest you find one you like. On a similar note, there are tab managers for Safari and Firefox.
If you are interested in Session Buddy, you can find it here: Session Buddy in the Chrome Store
What about other web browsers?
Open tabs going rogue are not limited to Google Chrome. We have just seen an enormous increase in Chrome issues of late. Safari and Firefox tabs can also cause trouble. Restarting the browser or the computer usually is step one. If it keeps happening, figuring out which extensions are causing problems is vital. A note, Firefox also calls extensions add-ons. Firefox also has something called plugins that could cause issues.
Sneaky Extensions
Some of you have been tricked into installing nefarious extensions, sometimes without even realizing it. The most common response we hear is, “I don’t know what that is. I never installed that.” Believe me; you did, probably without knowing it. That’s okay. It happens. YouTube downloaders, video downloaders, free font downloaders, and fake Adobe flash updates are significant sources of malware. ESET, our malware scanner is excellent, but not perfect
To see your installed extensions:
Chrome: Go to Window > Extensions on the menu bar
Firefox: Go to Tools > Add-ons on the menu bar, then choose Extensions from the list
Safari: Go to Safari > Preferences on the menu bar, then choose extensions at the top of the window
Moral of the story…
We are stretching the limits of what web browsers were designed for. In order to add more features and functionality, background processes run on our computer. This eats up memory, battery life and when they go crazy, they eat up our time and sanity. The more extensions and tabs you have, the more likely your computer might choke. I am not trying to tab shame you. At this very moment, I have five Safari windows open with 10-20 tabs open in each.
Restarting your web browser or your computer is a value proposition. How long can you deal with the craziness before restarting is preferable to not restarting? It does not always solve a problem, but it is almost always the first thing we will have you do before we can perform more detailed troubleshooting. Also, try a different web browser from time-to-time. We have seen Chrome not consistently do well with printing PDFs and even do worse with YouTube than Firefox or Safari. Weird.
I hope this helps.
Bonus Content: Why the heck is it called a Daemon?
No this is not a demon; it is a daemon. It comes from Greek Mythology. A daemon is a spirit that works behind the scenes. It is a helper with no bias towards good or evil. It just works on the job it was given.
To confuse matters, software developers have adopted horned, devil-like figures to represent daemons. I guess they make better plush toys for their desks.
Bill Bates
Pinewood School
"Be the EdTech Superhero you were meant to be!"
Email: bbates@pinewood.edu
Website: https://medium.com/@thetrainingguy
Twitter: @TheTrainingGuy