Chrome downloads freeze whole system

[WebHead]

The latest couple of builds of Chrome for Mac have been freezing my system during large (several hundred MB or more) downloads. Have experienced it in both Mega.nz and G-drive downloads. I lose Bluetooth/wi-fi connectivity, other apps freeze, and in extreme cases WindowServer seizes up and I get logged out.

Anyone else seeing this?

(Running 12.2.1 on an i9 iMac. Have had issues in the past where Chrome downloads "monopolise" my bandwidth and freeze other web traffic, but never apps or my whole system.)

 

[Morgenland]

Have you ever asked yourself why MS Office, or most software for that matter, has become so memory hungry? Does this speak for or against proficiency? Are programmers charged by numbers of lines? Are hungry operating systems running better? You know the answer yourself, so, why are you trying to install such browser?
Word 5.1 was 8.79 MB I know the difference to today very well; if one had scaled its performance range linearly (by good programming), today's version could probably get along with 50 MB instead of 2.22 GB of the current standalone counterpart, if one leaves out all the catalog stuff).

Assuming you design websites, why do you support the growing world of browsers that don't render pages while ad and script blockers are activated. Chrome is certainly quite snappy as an ad-serving data-collecting browser (and sure, there are add-ons, but they'll just be useless alibi in the future). I'm glad what a tough strategy Apple/Safari drives, and therefore I honor this browser (core is 14MB) by daily use, thus the ominous development is at least delayed a bit.

Have you ever done a clean uninstall to see where Chrome spreads itself (e.g. AppCleaner plus post-check EasyFind)? Did you analyze those fragments? Hardly anyone has time or desire to do that and you can expect the answer to your question there.

If someone puts a burnt steak on my plate, I throw it away real quick.

 

[WebHead]

Okay, this turned out to be kernel panics related to a failing HD, not Chrome (I guess Chrome was the app mostly accessing the HD so there was a false association).

Have since replaced the HD but I now have two other issues involving Chrome:

1. A (single) kernel panic where the crash report pointed to the Chrome Helper process. I did have a very busy tab left open that was constantly pulling in video and animated ads, which I've since closed. So far so good.
2. A Time Machine backup failed, saying it couldn't back up a .leveldb file in Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/IndexedDB. I know I could exclude that file/directory from the backup, but that wouldn't really address the underlying issue.