Remember When Chrome Went Bad on MacOS?

Loren Brichter , back in 2020: Short story: Google Chrome installs an updater called Keystone on your computer, which is bizarrely correlated to massive unexplained CPU usage in WindowServer (a system process) [1] , and made my whole computer slow even when Chrome wasn’t running . Deleting Chrome and Keystone made my computer way, way faster, all the time . Long story: I noticed my brand new 16” MacBook Pro started acting sluggishly doing even trivial things like scrolling. Activity Monitor showed nothing from Google using the CPU, but WindowServer was taking ~80%, which is abnormally high (it should use Everything was instantly and noticeably faster, and WindowServer CPU was well under 10% again. Not all Mac users, but many, found that just having Chrome installed slowed down their Macs dramatically. Completely uninstalling Chrome — and its pernicious background agents — solved the problem. This years-old “Chrome Is Bad” saga came to mind when I wrote about Google’s Gemini Mac app’s background agents . It seems as though Google eventually fixed these Chrome bugs — or Apple changed something in a MacOS update that fixed the bugs for them — but I’ve never seen a full explanation of the problem and eventual solution. Does anyone know what happened here? The main point is it never should have happened in the first place. A third-party app should just be a third-party app — not add components to your system software just so it can update itself when it isn’t running. Background agents and extensions are sometimes necessary to the functionality of a product.