Is it normal for multiple processes of GNOME-shell to show up in top/htop?

I've recently installed and started using htop instead of the System Monitor included in default Ubuntu installations and I noticed something weird. I arranged htop to display the processes by memory usage and noticed I have 9 instances of GNOME-Shell running, all with different PID's.

Is this normal for GNOME? I never noticed it before on other Ubuntu installs, but to be fair I've never looked either.

They are probably threads. Are they consecutive PIDs, and show up in branches under one gnome-shell process when you run ps fx|grep gnome-shell?

This is quite common when a process fork/execs or uses multiple threads.