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Q: The list of processes in my Task Manager shows “Microsoft Edge (48)” and “Google Chrome (42)” immediately after startup. Beneath each are the list of 48 & 42 running things respectively. That said, Edge has only seven tabs and Chrome only five tabs open. As you’d expect, both items are dominating memory consumption with the setup after a routine boot and no other actions at 66%. What are those two browsers also running above/beyond the tabs open on launch?

 – William R.
Fort Walton Beach, Florida

A: Ah, Reader William, you have stumbled across one of the great mysteries of the modern web browser!  Solving it will earn you – well, nothing, but perhaps it will give you a great deal of satisfaction.  I’m happy to assist.

What you are seeing for each browser is not an aggregation of the number of tabs you have open.  Rather it is the number of independent processes, or threads, running under the browser.  This will include a main browser process, a separate process for each tab you have open, plus a process for every browser extension or Browser Helper Object, plus processes for your computer’s Graphics Processing Unit and other miscellaneous internal browser functions.  Then there are utility processes that handle specific tasks like decoding and playing audio, processing network requests, storing or retrieving data, and more.

Why so many?  Well, modern browsers are specially architected to split up the workload into separate processes for security, stability, and performance.  Each tab, extension, and plugin runs in its own process that is protected from every other running process.  This is a security measure that prevents malicious code that enters a tab from one site from affecting other tabs or the rest of the system.

This architecture also improves stability in that, if a website or extension crashes, the extent of the effect is limited to that individual process, allowing the rest of the browser and its other tabs to continue.

Performance is improved through splitting all these sub-tasks into individual processes.  This allows each process to have its own memory space, and for the browser to make better use of multiple-core CPUs, which can make web pages load faster.

You can get a lot more information about what all of these processes are, and how many system resources each is using by taking a peek under the hood at the browser’s own built-in task manager, which is separate from the Windows task manager.  In both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, you can open the browser task manager with the key combination Shift+Esc.  Don’t get too bogged down by what you see in there – you’re not likely to understand what all the processes do.  But hey – you asked!

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