Many Programs are now running in the Background

[PotentPeas]

You shouldn't have to, and you shouldn't. Background processes are a perfectly normal part of any operating system, and in fact, your OS wouldn't work without them. Neither would your apps.

I get that there are some legit cases for background apps. Chrome keeps an update manager running so that your browser can remain up to date even if you don't have it open. That's... OK (but you should still be able to turn it off if you manage app updates with another tool, and they don't make that easy).

I think Adobe pushes the envelope here a little too much. They don't need a "Crash Processor" background process running (and using CPU time!!) if I don't have any Adobe apps open. Just let it finish any job that it has and quit, and run it again if I open another Adobe app.

They also have "Creative Cloud Content Manager" which has used almost 2 days of background CPU time on my system (which currently has an uptime of 11 days). I don't use Creative Cloud for anything other than installing and updating Adobe apps, I don't leave the Creative Cloud program running, I don't have any Creative Cloud file sync enabled. What is it doing?? That's just being wasteful.

I do not have Creative Cloud as "allowed to run background tasks" in macOS settings, so these processes don't start at boot, but they do start if I fire up Photoshop and they don't quit when I close it.

 

[Comfortably Numb]

I get that there are some legit cases for background apps.

It's not just "some". It's actually most of them. The entirety of macOS is a web of interconnected processes, very few of them ever interface with the user. Almost all apps make use of that. Everything your apps do, outside from drawing its UI windows, is done through background processes.

It's how operating systems work. Everything is a process.

I think Adobe pushes the envelope here a little too much.

Adobe is a bitch, I give you that. You would have to go over my dead body to be able to install anything from Adobe on my machines.

 

[bogdanw]

Chrome keeps an update manager running so that your browser can remain up to date even if you don't have it open. That's... OK (but you should still be able to turn it off if you manage app updates with another tool, and they don't make that easy).

Manage Chrome updates (Mac)
https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7591084?hl=en
"Open the com.google.Keystone.plist file in your preferred XML editor.
Under the updatePolicies key, add the Chrome browser UpdateDefault key entry, and set the key value to 2. The following example shows settings for Chrome browser (com.google.Chrome) that turns off scheduled auto-updates and prevents users from manually installing updates using chrome://settings/help:
<key>updatePolicies</key>
<dict>
<key>global</key>
<dict>
<key>UpdateDefault</key>
<integer>3</integer>
</dict>
</dict>
Save your changes."

&

"<integer>2</integer>
Turns off auto-updates. This stops Google Software Update automatically updating all users to the latest stable version of Chrome. Updates are only applied when the user manually checks for updates. For example, on the chrome://help page or by running the CheckForUpdatesNow.command utility.

<integer>3</integer>
Updates are never applied."

 

[nmt1900]

It does not seem to be true - as even Weather which is actually running in background, does not have indicator dot under it. What comes to Google updater, it is misleading to claim that it constantly runs in background. It runs periodically on preset interval defined in its' settings (same applies to most of other updater services as well).

However I saw situation like this initially where Chrome icon had sort of half-dim dot under it after initial installation. That has not happened after that.

What comes to running in background after being closed, I remember seeing that setting in Chrome for Windows, but it is not present in Chrome for macOS.

 

[Ben J.]

Reminds me of how it works in iOS; there is no 'quit' in iOS. Any apps opened will stay in memory until the OS finds it's better to quit it because the memory is needed for something else, and the app hasn't been used in a good while.

A lot of people are not aware of this. You can easlily check how many apps you have running on an iphone by swiping up, and keeping your finger touching the middle of the screen. You'll see a stack of all apps you've used since startup, and if you want, quit (remove from memory) any or all apps by grabbing and pushing them over the top edge of the screen.

 

[nmt1900]

That is not 100% true for iOS or any other mobile device. It is actually a "recents" list.
Some of these apps do run in the background (like music or podcast apps when listening) but others are in "frozen state" to wake up when brought to foreground (and then there are apps/services which do run in background without being in that list).

No mobile device would be able to have reasonable battery life if all apps in recents list would constantly run in background.

 

[Comfortably Numb]

iOS and macOS handle this *very* very differently.

 

[Ben J.]

That is not 100% true for iOS or any other mobile device. It is actually a "recents" list.
Some of these apps do run in the background (like music or podcast apps when listening) but others are in "frozen state" to wake up when brought to foreground (and then there are apps/services which do run in background without being in that list).

No mobile device would be able to have reasonable battery life if all apps in recents list would constantly run in background.

OK, so you're saying it's a 'recent list'. And the apps are in a 'frozen state'. And apps in memory on iOS devices are causing battery depletion. 🙄

 

[haralds]

Apple's guilty of it too. My MacBook's "apps using significant energy" menu sometimes has Photos listed, even though I don't even use Photos on that machine.

Photos is syncing, indexing, and classifying photos in the background.

 

[nmt1900]

OK, so you're saying it's a 'recent list'. And the apps are in a 'frozen state'. And apps in memory on iOS devices are causing battery depletion. 🙄

If you listen to podcasts or music on iPhone, then you can compare battery use at time when device is not in use and when you do the listening. If all apps would run constantly in the background, battery use would be even higher than normally at the time when you do listen to music/podcasts. Phone would not probably survive even 24 hours on one charge even when left unused on the table for all this time...

 

[benholt]

Not on GG yet (waiting for public beta) but if it really does surface what was already happening, Adobe is the obvious culprit. CCXProcess, CoreSync, AdobeIPCBroker, the various Crash Reporter Helpers — they all relaunch via ~/Library/LaunchAgents plists even after Activity Monitor kills them, which is why people think they "uninstalled" Adobe but stuff keeps respawning. A visible dock affordance to actually kill them would be a real win for creative-app users; otherwise launchctl unload -w on the specific com.adobe.*.plist files in ~/Library/LaunchAgents is the durable answer (just keep the actual CC updater loaded if you want auto-updates).