Page(s) Unresponsive in Google Chrome

In Windows XP2, running Google Chrome (too long to responds), I often receive a message "Page(s) Unresponsive" asking me to either "kill pages" or "wait".

I already reinstalled it, but the same problem persists.

My PC specs:

• Intel P4 1.8GHz
• 1 GB Ram
• 64mb BGA
• 5 GB free HD space (In System Partition)

How to solve this problem?

There are a a few common causes for this behavior. Some are easier to fix than others.

Performance/Overload

The most common cause of the hang is that the browser/system is overloaded.

(While in the past people would often sell old, obsolete computers as "Internet/surfing/browsing/email/etc, systems", the fact is that these days, you need a pretty hefty system to even just browse the Internet anymore because many sites use a bevy of plugins as such like Flash, Silverlight, WebGL, JavaScript, advanced HTML5 functions, etc. As a result, even a P4 1.8GHz system can come to a crawl when trying to render and display more than a few beefy sites.)

To determine if the browser is overloaded, open the Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) and view the CPU load (do so while Chrome is closed, then again when you get the hang). If you see that the usage is high, then what is likely happening is that the browser is trying to render pages that the system is having trouble handling.

In this case, there are a few things to try that can help.

• Upgrading hardware (CPU, memory, video-card in particular) one way to resolve this issue. Of course this is not necessarily practical or even always possible.

• Another way to deal with such pages is to keep as few tabs open as possible. Even when a tab is in the background, they still consume resources, and depending on the page and the JavaScript and plugins it uses, they can be bogging the rest of the browser (and whole system for that matter) down.

• In general, it is advisable to keep as few extensions and plugins installed as possible. The fact is that the more extensions you have, the slower the whole browser gets because it has so much more processing to do. The same goes for plugins, though they usually only apply to pages that include them while extensions are always active. You should uninstall any extensions and plugins you don't need, and disable any you do need, but don't use (very) regularly.

• Keep your extensions and plugins updated. Not only do updates fix security issues, but they often include performance improvements as well, which can be anywhere from insignificant to dramatic.

  • You can update extensions by opening chrome://extensions, clicking Developer Mode, and then Update Extensions (NB it only updates enabled extensions, which is another reason to keep as few as needed)
  • Plugins need to be updated manually, but you can use some tools to help track them to simplify the task

• Disable JavaScript (by default). Turning JavaScript off altogether will, not surprisingly, greatly increase performance and reduce the load on the system, thus allowing pages to be rendered faster. You can turn it off by going to chrome://chrome/settings/content (it may be different for different versions of Chrome, but will usually be under Settings->Content Settings->JavaScript in general).

  • Note however, that JavaScript is pretty much essential for many sites these days, so turning it off "whole-hog" isn't a universal fix. Instead, what you will want to do is to either turn it off by default and then set exceptions to allow it on certain pages, or to turn it on by default and set exceptions to block it on certain pages.

• Like with JavaScript, plugins will bog the browser down, but unlike JavaScript, you don't have to turn plugins on or off (or even manage block/allow lists), you can control plugins per-element by setting plugins to Click-to-Play. Normally, plugins are automatically loaded and run, but that is not always desirable (or efficient). You can set Chrome to display a placeholder for plugins which you can then either click to run it, click the ☒ to remove the object, or just ignore it. You can do this in the same page as with JavaScript (chrome://chrome/settings/content), though in older versions of Chrome, you may need to enable the feature first in chrome://flags.

  • You can also accomplish selective plugin- (usually Flash-)blocking with extensions (but don't go overboard; pick one or two good ones; using a dozen will just bog the system down again).

• Another factor that often causes Chrome tabs to hang is due to ads. Some sites are just awful. They have pop-ups, pop-unders, Flash ads, Silverlight ads, countless JavaScript ads, image ads, video ads, and so on. Things are not as bad as they were in the "early days" of the Internet when you could get caught up in a so-called "pornado storm", but the Internet is still quite laden with CPU- and bandwidth-hogging ads. Installing an ad-blocker will help to squelch the flood of ads to reduce the impact they make on the browser. You can do this by using a HOSTS file and/or by installing an ad-blocking extension (again, don't go overboard).

Bugs

Another cause of hangs can be bugs.

• Bugs can be present in the browser itself, and updating it can help. For Google Chrome, go to Wrench menu->About to have it auto-update.
• Bugs can also be present in plugins and extensions. For this, refer back to the previous section on updating them.
• Bugs can also be present in webpages (e.g., a piece of JavaScript with an infinite loop or AJAX blocked on a resource).
  • If the page is the problem, one options of course is to contact the webmaster and let them know about the problem and wait for them to fix it.
  • Another options is to view the Google Cache or Internet Archive/"Way Back Machine" of the page which may be from before the bug was introduced. In fact, with the Google Cache, you can click the text-only link in the header to view the page much fast by getting only the text of the page without images, plugins, scripts, etc.

Network

Network issues can also cause Chrome to hang like that. For example, if the page is blocking on a resource, and the site is down, the network is congested, your connection is being throttled, etc. then it can sit there waiting and waiting. In this case, you would need to check your Internet connection, though usually, this sort of problem will be intermittent. If you are experiencing it regularly like you said, then it is probably not the network connection.

Aliens and Gremlins

Finally, there are other, miscellaneous, obscure, esoteric, niche, oddball causes that can make tabs hang. These are the freaks that have no rhyme or reason and cannot be explained except perhaps by soothsayers and warlocks.

One such example is that a few months ago, a very small handful sites (e.g., Chrome Webstore, VirusTotal) stopped working for me. They would very occasionally load, but would often sit there stuck (usually waiting on some .js Google Adsense files to load), with the throbber spinning and/or throwing up an unresponsive prompt. I tried everything from enabling everything to disabling everything, but nothing worked. Eventually I found that by disabling the DNS-prefetching function, they started working again. The real kicker is that the DNS-prefetching function had already been enabled for some time while the sites were still working, so it must have been a change in the pages that caused the issue (though other people were still able to load the sites, so either they had the function disabled or were using different browsers or newer versions).

The point is that one of the "downside-effects" of the software-as-a-service paradigm is that things that were working just fine can suddenly break and stop working without you having made any changes at all. This gives rise to a whole host of bizarre and unexplainable causes of problems.

1. if you test your ASP, JSP or PHP code in localhost, check your javascript code, In my experience, bad javascript loop will make chrome unresponsive.

2. check your Anti-virus software, try to stop it and open chrome again.

3. uninstall chrome and download a different version, install again.

4. maybe RAM is lower. show your Windows Task Manager, see the RAM and CPU usage. (In my PC, each page cost 10-35M RAM, I think 1 GB Ram is enough, so this is the 4th possible)

try to check extension for google chrome flash, flash extensions this could be causing us to google chrome error.

1. Go to Google chrome.

2. In the address bar (where typing a web address) type the command: about:plugins

3. Cari the word "Flash" and click "Disable"

4. Restart google chrome and see if the problem can be resolved.

Maybe your PC is running low on memory. Chrome uses so many processes.

Try to avoid too many tabs opened and don't use too many add-ons in Chrome, because it will cause too many processes and a crash will occur.

You can perform the steps below:

1. Use the Chrome Javascript debugger to pause (breaks running code) during the unresponsiveness. It takes some timing, but it should break in the middle of whatever is running too long.

2. You can then use the debugger controls to step around and see what is looping unnecessarily.