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Is it possible to run Google Chrome in a single process?

I found the only flag – --single-process – but running Chrome with it shows me the following message:

You are using an unsupported command-line flag: --single-process. Stability and security will suffer.

and it still runs in multiple processes...

Is there something similar?

EvgenKo423
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VladL
  • 151

1 Answers1

3

The --single-process option you've found is not officially supported, so it's not guaranteed to work, may still use more than a single process and may cause additional performance or stability issues.

There are a couple of other Chromium options you could use instead:

  1. Since Chromium 67 you may want to disable Site Isolation using flag chrome://flags/#site-isolation-trial-opt-out or --disable-site-isolation-trials command line option. This will force subframes to run in their pages' processes and allow you to use the next option;

    Note: Since about July 2022 this option breaks all Cloudflare CAPTCHAs/​challenges!
    To workaround this issue you'll need to add a flag chrome://flags/#isolate-origins or --isolate-origins command line option as https://challenges.cloudflare.com.

    This appears to be a browser bug. Either that or Cloudflare is intentionally using Site Isolation / Spectre to detect browsers...

  2. You could explicitly limit the amount of renderer processes with --renderer-process-limit=2 command line option. This will force all the tabs and extensions to use a single process (per each type);

  3. With --in-process-gpu option it will run the GPU process as a thread in the main browser process. These processes consume most of the CPU time and the GPU driver crash will likely crash the whole browser, so you probably don't wanna use it.

Warning!
Most of these options will reduce the security of your browser! You use them at your own risk.

I was testing these options on Vivaldi 3.3 (Chrome 85) with 5 Super User tabs, 3 other tabs and 4 extensions. Here are the results I've got:

Default:                                    24 processes
Default - Site Isolation:                   19 processes
Default - Site Isolation + Renderer Limit:  10 processes
EvgenKo423
  • 245