Chrome Internet Browser: Key Challenges and Limitations

In 2025, the Chrome Internet Browser remains a fixture on desktops and devices worldwide, but its journey is marked by a series of persistent challenges that shape the daily experiences of users and IT teams. Chrome's story is one of technical innovation, but also of recurring struggles—especially in performance, security, privacy, and enterprise reliability.

Performance issues are often the first to surface. Many users have shared their frustration with Chrome's high RAM usage, sometimes exceeding a gigabyte with only a few tabs open. Despite Google's introduction of Memory Saver Mode and hardware acceleration, memory leaks remain a problem, particularly on devices with 8GB of RAM or less. Features like preloading and multi-tab isolation, intended to improve speed, can inflate RAM consumption, forcing users to disable prediction services or limit background processes. Some discover that Chrome's processes linger after closure, consuming 10GB+ of RAM and requiring force-quitting or even OS-level intervention.

Security is another ongoing concern. In March 2025, Operation ForumTroll exploited a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2025-2783) to bypass Chrome's sandbox, deploying spyware through phishing links without user interaction. Just two months later, CVE-2025-4664 allowed cross-origin data leaks, prompting emergency patches to prevent session hijacking. These incidents underscore how sandbox and Mojo framework flaws continue to be exploited, demanding rapid response from Google's security team.

Privacy, once a hallmark of Chrome's brand, has become a source of controversy. 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.

Enterprise users face their own set of obstacles. 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. 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 Internet Browser 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.