Site Isolation Feature enabled by Google for 99% of Chrome Desktop Users

Earlier when most web browsers were designed, the web pages were simple and hence were rendered in the same process, to keep resource usage low.

However, with the growing technology, there has been a significant shift in the active web page content. Ranging from pages designed using JavaScript to make the web pages interactive and create richer user interfaces with reduced server load to Flash, a technology used by Adobe to show animation on web pages, web-pages nowadays are full of “web apps”. Browsers that keep all the running apps in one process may face real challenges related to security, responsiveness and robustness.

1. If one web app crashes, it will take the entire web browser with it, including all the web apps that are open.
2. Web apps have to compete for CPU time, on a single thread rendering the browser unresponsive at times.
3. Some webpage may have malicious code embedded that may compromise the entire system.

Hence the browser must keep different apps isolated from each other to avoid any loopholes.

Google Chrome has always had a multi-process architecture, where different tabs are assigned different renderer processes.

This allows Google Chrome to have its own Task Manager that lets you track the resource usage of each web app and plug-in rather than the entire browser as a whole. It also enables you to kill the process of any web app that is not responding or appears malicious without having to restart the entire browser.

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