What Is Chrome’s Software Reporter Tool Process, and Can You Disable It?

Chrome’s Software Reporter Tool scans for malware or other software that might affect Chrome, removes it, and reports that data back to Google. To disable the Software Reporter Tool, click on the three-dot menu button in Chrome, navigate to Settings > Advanced > System, and disable “Continue Running Background Apps When Google Chrome is Closed.”

Chrome’s Software Reporter Tool is a feature that, unfortunately, often demands a lot of memory. Because of that, it might seem more like a burden than a tool. So, what is it exactly, and how can you disable it?

What Is Software Reporter and What Does It Do?

The Software Reporter tool, commonly termed as the Clean-up tool, is part of the Google Chrome installation. This feature is responsible for monitoring malwares or tools that affect the usual processing of Chrome. Software Reporter removes harmful software and reports the collected data back to Google.

It’s a background process, so you don’t need to configure it to make it work. Just by opening Chrome, you’ll get this utility up and running in your system. Google designed this program in an attempt to minimize crashes and improve the user experience when using Google Chrome.

Chrome utilizes a lot of plugins, extensions, and processes just to deliver the best user experience. While Software Reporter has a useful purpose, you might not appreciate its resource consumption.

RELATED: Stop Complaining That Your Browser Uses Lots of RAM: It’s a Good Thing

To give you an idea of how much it consumes, here’s an image of the Task Manager taken from a computer with 12GB of RAM.

Before the Software Reporter Tool was enabled, CPU, Memory, and Disk utilization were low.

After enabling the Software Reporter Tool and restarting Chrome, there was a sudden surge in the utilization of the resources, as you can see below.

This is a major drawback of the Software Reporter Tool, as you might constantly experience a decline in the performance of your system.

Is It Safe to Disable the Software Reporter Tool of Chrome?

You might already be wondering whether it’s OK to just disable it. Many users choose to disable it despite Google’s recommendation to keep it on.

We don’t recommend disabling Sofware Reporter unless you absolutely have to. Make sure that your computer’s operating system and security settings are up-to-date. Similarly, you should also be cautious about potentially malicious websites and links so that you can stay safe from viruses.

How to Disable the Software Reporter Tool

Warning: You’re disabling a security feature, so only do this if you’re certain that you want to and know how to stay safe without it.

This is the most straightforward way of disabling Chrome’s Software Reporter Tool. Google Chrome has settings that can be easily disabled to prevent background processes from running. To access these settings, just follow the steps below.

Launch Google Chrome. If it isn’t on your desktop yet, you can simply search for “Google Chrome” or “Chrome” and click it.

With Chrome already opened, click the Customize button or the three dots in the upper-right corner of your browser. After that, click the “Settings” option to display Google Chrome’s settings.

Locate the “System” settings. You can do this in two ways—by using the search box or by opening the Advanced section. For the purposes of this tutorial, we’ll demonstrate to you the latter option.

On the side navigation of Chrome’s Settings page, click the “Advanced” drop-down button to display additional menus. From here, click the “System” option. This will redirect you to a page similar to the image below.

From the “System” section, turn off the option that says “Continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed.”

After that, Chrome will automatically activate your changes, so you can just exit the tab when you’re done. Now, your system’s memory can finally take a breather, as it doesn’t continuously run Chrome processes even when Chrome is closed.

Of course, if you reset the settings of your Chrome browser, the setting for enabling background apps gets reactivated. You can just disable it again If that happens.

With the Software Reporter tool disabled, you can speed up Chrome even more by hunting down resource-hungry extensions.

RELATED: How to Find and Disable Resource-Hungry Chrome Extensions