Will Google Chrome Update Kill Mac Performance?

Google Chrome will slow down your Mac performance. I’m going to explain why, how, and most importantly – what you can do about it. Because it’s a controversy, some people throw Chrome in a ready-made trash fire, others say there’s no evidence, and even talking about it is irresponsible and shameful.

I think we can talk about this in a fair and transparent way, the most reasonable way possible is how we get the truth.

Keystone

Lauren Brictor on Twitter:

Now, if you do not know Lorraine, he gave Steve Jobs the rock-solid 60 frames per second – the 11000 IQ genius type that helped create a formal 9000 IQ, graphics pipeline for the original iPhone, and demanded his return in 2007. Loren created Tweet (which was purchased by Twitter and became the first official Twitter app), invented the Bull-to-Update, and later created the LetterPress game.

Now, Keystone, Google’s background update, hides itself from activity monitoring; This will only show up when Chrome is actively updated. But, according to Lauren’s theory, when that process goes wrong, the keystone goes wrong before it is displayed on the activity monitor, which effectively hides it even when it causes trouble.

Also, this is nothing new, as Wired called the keystone ‘evil’ when it was kicked off with Google Earth in 2009. That was 10 years ago. Other websites have reported other issues since then.

I do not know if Google is doing something harmful with Keystone, or figured out how to do it by a third party (which warned about the wire). But by no means do I want to convey that I recommend for the US to be skeptical (even though there are many good people working in Chrome) that it’s been a decade + and it is still “not fixed”. There is no reason for software to automatically update what Chrome / Keystone was doing. It also has a long history of crushing Max.

From Loren’s website, this part echoed with me, and in a moment I’ll tell you:

My new 16 “MacBook Pro started to sluggish even for small things like scrolling. nothing Uses CPU from Google, but Windows server took up ~ 80%, which is unusually high (it should typically use <10%).

All the normal things (quitting apps, exiting other users, restarting, clearing PRAM, etc.) did nothing, and then after a while I installed Chrome to test a website.

I removed Chrome and noticed the keystone while clearing Chrome’s other options and cache. I removed everything I could find from Google and restarted the computer, it was like night and day. Everything was instantaneous and remarkably fast, and the Windows server CPU was again under 10%.

Windows server pain

Throughout the year, I was incredibly frustrated and frustrated by similar issues, and similarly tried everything I could think of.

It was so bad when I tried all night to finish my banned video reviews for iPhones, Apple Watch, Max and everything released this year. In fact, overnight, watching the Final Cut Pro performance drop, hours, precious hours, restarts, uninstalling plug-ins, is all imaginable. I blamed Magos Catalina for it because it seemed to be one of the painful intermediate updates I blamed for everything. So, I tweeted my complaints about it, about PDK, the plugin manager daemon causing it, whether the window server itself behaved rudely or got worse. I even took the rare step for myself and bit a few friends on the Big Fruit. Never received any satisfactory answers or solutions.

not yet.

Now, I use Safari almost all the time because I get better performance and battery life way, way, way through Safari than I do with Chrome, I think because they mostly use hardware and software computer resources and handle tabs. I’ll be back to other browsers in a minute.

Google, primarily a web-based advertising company, has very different priorities than primarily native-based device company Apple, and Chrome has completely destroyed browser dominance, time-consuming developers and start-ups like Chrome to treat Internet Explorer as a product to destroy Internet Explorer. Some websites and web applications, including Google, work best or only in Chrome. Although Google’s Bling and Chromium are excluded from Apple’s webkit, the different directions they take from Safari often result in the short end of the Safari most important support stick.

The Chrome team was responsive enough even on a Saturday night:

We are not aware of any open issues causing high CPU usage from Keystone, but please file a bug at http://crbug.com with steps to recreate it, we will try and fix it as soon as possible.

It will show up when Keystone Performance checks for specific checks and updates, but it seems to trigger the Windows server when Windows server is not displayed or before or when trying to display it.

Since the keystone is not yet displayed, but the windows server is blowing, it is completely obvious that the keystone may be due. Like a dark object, you can only measure its effect on the rest of the system. Yes, of course the Post Hog Ergo Proctor understood this logical lie and deleting it fixes the problem.

Dark Matter

Now, yes, launching the Activity Monitor will cause Windows to spike because you can’t notice anything without affecting it, but in this case, you start it because you’re already noticing performance issues, not just hell. If removing the keystone appears to prevent those performance issues, you are checking for the presence of that dark object. So no, there is no reward for pointing out that part.

Of course, there may be other explanations, such as tapping the keystone, something else that causes it, or any problem between the macos and the keystone, or whatever.

But putting on my consumer hat for a moment – I don’t care. That is not my problem. This is to find 9000 IQs. I am a parent here. I do not want or need to know the details. I can work without realizing the need to throw a multi-thousand dollar machine out the window.

There is also a school of thought here that Chrome should not be updated in this way regardless. Yes, Google Chrome wants to make the update process essentially invisible, but there are plenty of apps handling updates every day from the Mac App Store to Spark, to traditional, transparent methods that leave no doubt about these kinds of things. When any company, not only Google, but also Zoom and Apple make the box so opaque, bad things tend to grow in it. Including performance and safety issues.

I now imagine that it attracts a ton of attention, raising awareness. It would be great if Magos or the Chrome team or anyone can figure this out, because at least Halla frustrated people definitely think they have found a solution to those frustrations, at least temporarily removing Chrome, or at least cutting the keystone on the knees.

None of these seem to do, the latter of which can be dangerous from a security standpoint.

What can you do

Loren suggests these steps, which I’m following right now, except until the Chrome issue is fixed or it’s reasonably proven that it’s not a Chrome issue:

1. Go to your / Applications folder and drag Chrome to the Trash.
2. In the discovery, click the Go menu (at the top of the screen), then click “Go to folder …”.
3. / Type in the library and press Enter.
   • Check the following folders: LaunchAgents, Application Support, Cache, Options.
   • Delete all Google folders, starting with com.google … and com.google.keystone …
4. Go back to “Go to folder …”.
5. Type in the library and press Enter. (See “~”)
   • Check the following folders: LaunchAgents, Application Support, Cache, Options.
   • Delete all Google folders, com.google … and anything starting with com.google.keystone …
6. Empty the trash and restart your computer.

This is what I do now. Problems are frustrating enough that even though I depend on Chrome for some things, I’m willing to give it a try because I depend on my Mac performance for everything.

There is also a MacOpServer article from 5 years ago that explains how to use terminal commands to change the frequency for keystone checks. You do not really want or want to remove Chrome, but you should stop throwing the system.

John Martellaro shows how to change it every 48 hours or so … or never… but pointing out correctly never leaves you without security updates, which opens you up to security exploits. I will leave a link in the description, but proceed with extreme caution.

Also, if you can’t stick with Safari because some bad website or another doesn’t support it properly, other chromium-based browsers like Microsoft Edge don’t have the same problem because when they use Google’s rendering engines, they don’t use Google’s software update engine. So, they have to be good.

Personally, I try this. If you have, let me know how it works for you.