A feature I love about Chrome is the Task Manager. Similar to Window’s Task Manager, the Chrome version shows the private memory, CPU use, and Network use for each window, tab, and extension.

This morning on my Linux laptop it was fine. After lunch, Chrome became unresponsive to the point it asked whether I wanted to kill the page or wait. I chose wait. It did not recover. I chose kill and refreshed a killed tab. It was just as unresponsive. So I opened up Chrome Task Manager. Flash was taking up over a GB of memory. That seemed odd, so I clicked on End Process. The unresponsive page immediately popped up.

Shutting down a program or even computer to deal with a hung or flaky process feels like using a sledgehammer to drive a nail. Shutting down just the part of a program causing issues feels like I am in control.