Chrome Making Strange Requests?

TL;DR

Chrome is making requests you don’t recognise? This guide helps you find out what’s happening and stop it. We’ll look at extensions, background apps, and network tools.

1. Check Your Extensions

Extensions are the most common cause of unexpected Chrome activity. Here’s how to investigate:

1. Open your Extensions page: Type chrome://extensions into the address bar and press Enter.
2. Review the list: Carefully look at each extension. Do you recognise them all? If not, that’s a red flag.
3. Disable suspicious extensions: Toggle the switch next to any extension you don’t trust or remember installing. Test Chrome after disabling each one to see if the problem stops.
4. Remove unwanted extensions: Click ‘Remove’ under the extension name to get rid of them completely.

2. Investigate Background Apps

Some apps run in the background even when you’re not actively using Chrome. They can also make network requests.

1. Open Task Manager: Press Shift+Esc (or right-click on the taskbar and select ‘Task Manager’).
2. Find Chrome processes: Look for multiple Chrome entries. These represent tabs, extensions, and background apps.
3. Identify resource usage: Sort by CPU or Memory to see which processes are using the most resources. High usage could indicate a problem app.
4. End suspicious processes: Right-click on any process you don’t recognise and select ‘End task’. Be careful! Ending essential Chrome processes can crash your browser.

3. Use Chrome’s Task Manager

Chrome has its own built-in task manager that provides more detail about running processes.

1. Open Chrome’s Task Manager: Press Shift+Esc (or go to Menu > More tools > Task Manager).
2. Examine Processes: This shows CPU, Memory and Network usage for each tab, extension and process.
3. End Problematic Tasks: Right-click on the task using excessive network bandwidth and select ‘End Process’.

4. Monitor Network Requests with Developer Tools

Chrome’s developer tools let you see exactly what requests Chrome is making.

1. Open Developer Tools: Press F12 (or right-click on the page and select ‘Inspect’).
2. Go to the Network tab: Click on the ‘Network’ tab.
3. Reload the page: Refresh the page you’re concerned about.
4. Filter requests: Use the filter box at the top to search for specific domains or file types (e.g., images, scripts). This helps narrow down the source of the strange requests.
5. Inspect request details: Click on a request in the list to see its headers, response data, and timing information. Look for anything suspicious like unusual URLs or large amounts of data being transferred.

5. Check Chrome Settings

Review your Chrome settings for potentially unwanted configurations.

1. Open Settings: Type chrome://settings into the address bar and press Enter.
2. Privacy and security: Check ‘Cookies and other site data’ and ‘Site permissions’. Make sure you haven’t granted permissions to sites you don’t trust.
3. Sync and Google services: Review what data is being synced with your Google account.
4. Reset Settings: As a last resort, you can reset Chrome settings to their defaults. This will disable extensions and clear some data, so back up anything important first! Go to ‘Advanced’ > ‘Reset settings’.

6. Run a Malware Scan

Although less common, malware can sometimes cause strange browser behaviour.

1. Use your antivirus software: Perform a full system scan with your preferred antivirus program.
2. Consider a second opinion scanner: If your primary antivirus doesn’t find anything, try using a free online scanner like Malwarebytes (https://www.malwarebytes.com/).