Update: After more research, this whole issue turns on the lack of code in the Webkit engine to support stopping animated GIFs. I always included the Chrome extension “Pause! Pause! Pause!” because I cannot read text on a page when there is something moving anywhere on page. Apparently that extension is what activates the race condition on so many pages. Removing the extension will solve the problem, but leaves Chrome still unusable on pages which include animated gifs not blocked by other extensions (Adblock, Ghostery, etc.).
The Webkit devs have been asked to include a means to stopping animated gifs, but I doubt they care. At any rate, I have come up with a temporary solution.
Original post begins here…
I cannot imagine the folks at Google don’t know about this. I even tried to make a bug report, but it never posted, as far as I can tell. It is not necessarily a sinister plot to silence my complaint, but it doesn’t matter. When I peruse their question board, I notice certain issues have not been addressed in two years or so.
Correction: My bug report finally showed up on their forum.
At any rate, here’s the beef: Chrome slams the CPU when you visit a page which uses lots of JScript for displaying the content. That would be just about every mainstream media site on the Internet, as well as most others these days. We call this “entering a race condition” — something grabbing all the CPU resources and not letting go until you shut down the process. So if I close that particular page, the CPU meter stays pegged at 100%.
Oddly, the browser is working fine, as if nothing is wrong. But then my CPU fans starts running fast and I can hear it, when it’s seldom needed during normal operations. These days I run GKrellM so I can watch stuff like this. This happens on multiple different Linux distributions, with or without any extensions installed, and has nothing to do with FlashPlayer or anything else. It has happened on several different machines running Linux.
The only way to stop the race condition is to kill the browser. There simply is no excuse for such shoddy software design. Again, I can’t imagine Google developers don’t know about this, and that I am the only one experiencing this. I can only surmise they hope no one else notices. One more reason you can’t trust Google to even come close to their own motto about being evil.
