Chrome wants to make extensions more secure by preventing them from sharing processes

A new Chrome Canary flag first discovered by Chrome Story called Strict Extension Isolation seeks to make your extensions more secure by keeping them from hanging out with each other. Basically, the current state of extensions is that they sometimes share processes in order to prevent large hits to your RAM and to keep the process count lower.

Chrome tabs already have sandboxing in place, which dictates that each tab must have its own process and be self-contained. This way, if one should crash or be maliciously affected, the other tabs won’t share the same fate. Strict Extension Isolation gives the same power to your add-ons!

Introduce feature to lock all extension processes.

This prevents extensions from sharing a process with each other when Chrome is over the process limit.

To prevent extensions from using up the process limit and forcing web renderer processes to share more often than before, this also modifies the process reuse logic to ignore any extension processes above the previous extension process limit (1/3 of the total).

Chromium Repositories

Moving forward – after this developer flag is implemented – each extension’s process will be locked to itself and will no longer share with its friends. It’s important to note that the end-user will more than likely see no change aside from more processes in their task manager (Everything button + Escape), but the fact that this is even happening is good news. To be honest, I’m a bit surprised that this was not already in place. However, with Chrome tabs taking up so much RAM, I imagine the developers had to cut corners somewhere.

This is just another example of how the Chromium team continues to implement tricks to make its browser the fastest and safest available. So much so that Microsoft is now killing off its traditional Internet Explorer in favor of a Chromium-based Edge alternative. As I stated in my Edge, Chrome, and the User Between article, the two teams continue to riff off of one another and share innovations to push Chromium further.