Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Google Chrome - How to Open a New Tab in a Separate Process?

I was surprised to see my Google Chrome launching a separate process for each newly opened tab. Actually I was under the impression that it was a bug as Chrome was in beta. But today I found this interesting piece of information, on Chrome site itself which explains that this behavior is intentional.

Google Chrome has a multi-process architecture which makes each opened tab run in a separate process rather than a separated thread.

I used the following simple HTML document to check this out.

<html>
  <head>
    <script type="text/javascript">
      <!--
      function createProc()
      {
        var w = window.open();
        w.opener = null;
        w.document.location = "
http://www.google.com";
      }
      //-->
    </script>
  </head> 
  <body>
    <input
type="button" value="Launch Google" onclick="javascript:createProc()"/>
  </body>
</html>

I could observe on my Windows Task Manager that clicking the "Launch Google" button opens up Google on a new tab, that runs in a separate Chrome process.

chrome_tab_in_new_process

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