The Freak Parade

Recently I’ve been doing most of my web browsing using Chrome, because it is new and fast and I generally don’t use a lot of plug-ins. Currently I have about 20 tabs open in the browser because I’m doing research on a few topics at once. Probably like most people, when I find some content I know I’ll want to read, I continue my further explorations in a new tab expecting to go through all the tabs later to read what I want to read or to catalog my findings using LaterLoop or Delicious. This works really well, except that every once in awhile something runs afoul in a particular web page and poof goes the browser. In IE 7, well, sucks to be me when that happens. My tabs were almost never restored. In FireFox 3 an unexpected crash did restore tabs upon reload, but the browser crashed a *lot* and starting a new instance and waiting for the tabs to load all at once is slow and rather painful. Worse, the web page that caused the crash would  be usually be marked for restore, so very often after a crash choosing to restore the previous session would result in a new crash, in an endless loop until I gave up on restoring the session or managed to get to the offending tab with a mad dash of my mouse and close it before it loaded the poisoned part of the page.

Well, those days of agony and uncertainty are gone with the introduction of "process-per-tab" browsing found in Chrome. I believe the newest version if IE will also support this model. Anyway, my computer suddenly slowed to a crawl, and task manager showed Chrome as the culprit. But not Chrome in general, just a tab in chrome. Actually, not a tab in chrome either, a window inside a tab in chrome that was hosting a flash animation, which had run amuck. Chrome actually has its own task manger, so the solution to my problem? Right click on the Chrome tool bar, choose task manager, look for excess processor usage, kill said process – and all is well. All 20 tabs breathed a collective sigh of relief, and I un-wet my pants and kissed my monitor. The damage? A portion of one of the web pages I had open showed a broken plugin graphic and a nice little notice at the top of the page said something like "A flash plug-in has crashed." A single tear rolled down my cheek for the poor, lonely flash animation I was forced to kill, but many more lives were saved. Thus is the price of progress.