The Reaper For Chrome, Sanity At The Sake Of Security

Installing The Rite of Ashk’Ente

Chrome users are familiar with it’s habit of devouring an impressive amount of system resources, generally preferring the taste of RAM but willing to chew up your CPU as well.  David Flater, a computer scientist at the NIST has developed a way to kill off a website that is behaving badly and sucking up more cycles than it deserves, aptly dubbed The Reaper.  This will let you set certain thresholds of CPU usage at which that particular Chrome process will be terminated, great not just for coin miners but also for those incredibly selfish sites you occasionally run into.  You can whitelist sites which do deserve your cycles.

There are two caveats which The Register alerts us to, the first of which is that it is not currently an add-in, you will need to grab the source code and install it manually via the provided instructions.  The second warning is more important, The Reaper uses an experimental API called chrome.processes which will increase the attack surface of your browser and may actually make your machine less secure.