The only practical way I found to do this was to monitor the system for running processes and if Activity Monitor is found, terminate my process so that the user won’t see it in Activity Monitor. I do not have a definite answer for this question. Those questions were: Is it possible for a process to hide itself from Activity Monitor while it is running? When does the updater process run and what does it do? Is the Google Chrome updater actually the cause of this WindowServer CPU usage that people are seeing? Is it possible for a process to hide itself from Activity Monitor while it is running?

What piqued my interest was the technical side of this story, and some questions that I thought of while I was reading Loren’s report. I do have it installed because some things that I do online require it, but my browser of choice has always been Safari. Let me preface this by making it very clear that I’m not a fan of Google Chrome. Many users have reported that this does work and that after removing Google Chrome from their machines, everything got a lot faster.

The website includes information on how to completely get rid of Chrome and its updater from your Mac to get your performance back, and went as far as calling it “malware” (that word has since been removed). This weekend, developer Loren Brichter released a website claiming that Google Chrome for Mac - or more specifically its auto-update mechanism - was causing the WindowServer process on macOS to constantly have high CPU usage, damaging the performance of macOS, even on high-end machines.

Chrome on mac os