The Lingering Processes
Google Chrome is notorious for consuming system resources, and this hunger doesn’t necessarily stop when you click the red “X” to close the browser. By default, Chrome is configured to allow specific background apps and extensions (like offline email sync, chat notifications, or certain download managers) to continue running silently even after the main browser windows are closed. While this ensures you get instant notifications, it means Chrome is perpetually eating up your RAM and CPU cycles in the background, which is disastrous if you are trying to free up memory to play a demanding video game or render a video.
Killing the Background Tasks
To fully reclaim your system resources and stop Google Chrome from automatically running apps in the background after you close it, you must disable the background permission in the system settings.
Open Google Chrome. Click the three vertical dots (the customize menu) in the top-right corner and select Settings. In the left-hand navigation sidebar, look down toward the bottom and click on System. In the main panel, the very first option is a toggle switch explicitly labelled Continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed. By default, this is turned on. Click the toggle to turn it Off. Now, when you close your final Chrome window, the browser will completely terminate all its processes, freeing up 100% of the RAM it was utilizing.