1
I observed throughout the day yesterday three episodes where my processor gets hijacked for a minute and the memory gets maxed out (12 gigs). The culprit was a seemingly infinite number of tabs being opened in one of the Google Chrome windows with ads: same advertisement in all tabs. I couldn't see the pages but by the tab title I could tell it was ads.
I suspect that this is done by one of the 15-20 chrome extensions I have installed. Most of them are legit popular extensions but some are a little shadier. Is there a way to find the culprit in such a situation? More specifically:
- Can I figure out which extension was responsible for opening new tabs without any action from me?
- Is there a tool that checks my extensions for ones that are known to be malicious?
- Are there are possible culprits that can open tabs in a Google Chrome window outside of Google Chrome?
Next time this happens I'll try to catch a screenshot, or at least jot down the name of the ad in the tab title.
OS: Ubuntu Linux 12.10
Chrome: 25.0.1364.160
Alan Turing
Posted 2013-03-13T13:40:32.527
Reputation: 249
1The best way would be to eliminate all the shaddy extensions. If the problem goes away then add one extension at a time, until the problem returns, or it goes away forever. – Ramhound – 2013-03-13T14:36:40.857
@Ramhound The problem happens rarely enough where that's a highly inefficient process. It's unclear to me what extensions are truly shady. I don't want to just remove them. I installed them for a reason... they're useful. – Alan Turing – 2013-03-13T14:42:25.843
I will be honest it doesn't sound like an extension that causes this problem. – Ramhound – 2013-03-13T14:47:05.990