Google Chrome Browser: Key Challenges and Limitations

In 2025, Google Chrome stands as the world's most popular browser, but its dominance is shadowed by a persistent set of challenges that frustrate users, IT professionals, and privacy advocates alike. The story of Chrome's evolution is one of innovation, but also of recurring limitations—especially in performance, security, privacy, and enterprise readiness.

For many, the first sign of trouble is Chrome's notorious appetite for system resources. It's not uncommon to find complaints about Chrome using over a gigabyte of RAM with just a handful of tabs open. Even as Google introduces features like Memory Saver Mode and hardware acceleration, systemic memory leaks persist, especially on devices with 8GB of RAM or less. Preloading features and multi-tab isolation, designed to boost speed, often have the opposite effect—inflating RAM consumption and forcing users to disable prediction services or limit background processes. Some discover, to their dismay, that Chrome's processes linger long after the browser is closed, consuming 10GB+ of RAM and requiring force-quitting or even OS-level intervention.

Security, too, is a moving target. In March 2025, Operation ForumTroll exploited a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2025-2783) to bypass Chrome's sandbox, deploying spyware through phishing links without any user interaction. Just two months later, CVE-2025-4664 made headlines for allowing cross-origin data leaks, prompting emergency patches to prevent session hijacking. These incidents highlight how sandbox and Mojo framework flaws continue to be exploited, demanding ever-faster patch cycles from Google's security team.

Privacy, once a cornerstone of Chrome's marketing, has become a battleground. In June 2024, a GDPR complaint alleged that Chrome's Privacy Sandbox pop-up misled users into enabling first-party tracking, violating consent requirements. By early 2025, expanded fingerprinting linked cross-device activity—from smart TVs to gaming consoles—to user profiles, circumventing cookie restrictions and raising new privacy concerns. Despite promises to phase out third-party cookies, Google abandoned the plan after regulatory pushback, preserving ad-tech tracking practices and undermining user trust.

For those relying on Chrome in the enterprise, the challenges multiply. The Privacy Sandbox's lack of MRC accreditation and SSP disintermediation threaten to break real-time bidding workflows for publishers, while memory corruption flaws in Chrome's network stack expose enterprises to heap exploitation during web app interactions. Meanwhile, integrated apps like Slack can spawn video_capture.mojom processes that consume 13GB+ of RAM, sometimes resisting termination even by admin users. Background processes for extensions—such as grammar checkers—can spike CPU usage to 90%+, requiring manual task management and further degrading stability.

Even the everyday user experience is not immune. Bloat from accumulated cache, outdated extensions, and HTTP/3 compatibility issues can slow Chrome to a crawl, sometimes requiring manual DNS overhauls. Many users report 7GB+ RAM usage even after closing tabs, with solutions often limited to disabling extensions or switching browsers entirely.

All of these issues—performance overhead, security gaps, privacy missteps, enterprise risks, and extension bloat—paint a picture of a browser struggling to balance functionality with privacy, security, and performance. As Chrome continues to evolve, the pressure mounts for Google to address these systemic inefficiencies and regulatory pressures, lest users and organizations seek alternatives that better align with their needs and expectations.