Schizophrenic browsers all of a sudden

[Andy Spragg]

Hi,

I just posted this to the Google Chrome forum but the issue, if there is one, goes beyond Chrome, and this is my favourite forum so I thought I'd ask here as well ...

Using WinXP PS3 with Avast, Online Armor, MBAM, and Trojanhunter. I have the latest stable version of Chrome. I can't find this "problem" mentioned anywhere in the FAQ etc ... when I launch Chrome, I have two or three (!) copies of chrome.exe listed in Windows task manager. When I first noticed the problem, it was three; when I tried just now, to see if it was reproducible, it was two. Whenever I've checked, since I noticed this weirdness few days ago, Firefox (my preferred browser) has only ever had one copy, as I would expect. But that's the only one that behaves as I expect, since I started checking. Tonight, IE had two copies of itself, and so did Safari (that I just installed tonight).

I say it's a problem because it seems pretty suspect to me. The actual browsers all seem to work fine. But what are the "shadow" copies doing? Should I suspect malware? Nothing shows up in my security software.

Andy

[mountaintree16]

Hi Andy,

I think that this is normal, IE does this too. I notice that when more than a couple tabs are open in IE, there are multiple IE processes in the Task manager, same thing happens with Chrome. Is this happening when you have more than two tabs open at a time in Chrome?

I think that this is because each tab functions as its own process so if one freezes up on you, you don't lose them all.

Hopefully someone who knows for sure (I am about 99.9% sure) can verify this for you

[Andy Spragg]

Hopefully someone who knows for sure (I am about 99.9% sure) can verify this for you

Hi! Thanks for reply. They just did, in the Chrome forum:

http://chromespot.com/forum/google-chrome-...sk-manager.html

I see the logic, but multiple exes sharing a common UI just seems wrong to me ...

Andy

[mountaintree16]

Ah,

Glad they had an answer for you

Er, whats a UI?

[Firefox]

mountaintree16 was right on the money....

When you open IE fresh start, you will get two iexplorer.exe in task manager. (they are for each tab that opens up)

[YoKenny1]

I see the logic, but multiple exes sharing a common UI just seems wrong to me ...

Please read

Automatic crash recovery

Tab isolation

If a website or add-on causes a tab to crash in Internet Explorer 8, only that tab is affected. The browser itself remains stable and other tabs remain unaffected, thereby minimizing any disruption to your browsing experience.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/features/safer.aspx

UI = User Interface

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Have you ever opened a large number of tabs only to find yourself overwhelmed when you go back to review them? Internet Explorer 8 introduces Tab Groups, which make tabbed browsing easier. When one tab is opened from another, the new tab is placed next to the originating tab and color coded, so that you can quickly see which tabs have related content. If you close a tab that's part of a group, another tab from the same group is displayed, enabling you to remain within the context of the current task rather than suddenly looking at an unrelated site.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/features/easier.aspx

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