What are Mimehandler and Plugin Processes of the Google Chrome program on Windows?

Mimehandler and Plugin Processes are additional processes (also called tasks) initiated by Google Chrome to display content of Web content of the specific MIME types.

This tutorial gives you a good example of the PDF Mimehandler and Plugin processes.

1. Run Google Chrome on Windows and open this Web page: http://file.fyicenter.com/a/sample.pdf. You see a simple PDF document displayed.

2. Open the Task Manager in Google Chrome by pressing Shift+Esc keys. You see the following list of processes:

Task                         Memory   CPU     Network   Process ID
=========================   =======   ===     =======   ==========
Browser                     51,172K   1.4           0         3036
GPU Process                 27,988K   0.4           0         6688
Tab: sample.pdf             34,468K   0.0           0         5860
Mimehandler: sample.pdf     26,340K   0.0           0         7540
Plugin: Chrome PDF Plugin    7,792K   0.0           0         6596

Now you know how Google Chrome displays a PDF document from the Web. It starts a child process called "Mimehandler", then calls the PDF plugin to display the PDF document.

The picture below shows you PDF Mimehandler and Plugin processes created by Google Chrome:

⇒ Extension Processes of Google Chrome

⇐ tasklist.exe and Chrome Task Manager

⇑ Google Chrome Processes on Windows System

⇑⇑ Chrome FAQ and Tutorials