How to Open Task Manager on Chromebook

Does the Chromebook have a Task Manager? If there is one, how to open a task manager on Chromebook?

Well, you don’t have CTRL + ALT + DELETE on the Chromebook. However, you still get a Task Manager that lets you force-close or kill apps and processes.

How to Open Task Manager on Chromebook

The Chromebook has a Task Manager. You can open the task manager using the keyboard shortcut SEARCH + ESCAPE.

Note: If you are on Windows, you can use SHIFT + ESC to open the Google Chrome Task Manager.

You will notice that the task manager looks similar to the Chrome browser’s task manager. However, on a Chromebook, you will see additional items listed.

You can also access the Task Manager from Chrome’s settings menu. To do this, click the three-dots settings icon:

Click More Tools and then choose Task Manager.

End Process and Apps (Force Quit)

Most of the time, the first process/app that you see on the list will be the Chrome browser. You cannot kill this process.

You will notice that the “End Process” icon is disabled:

Force-close Android Apps

You can force-close or “kill” Android apps from the Task Manager. Open the Task Manager, select the app and click End Process.

You can also end:

• System processes (proceed with caution)
• Chrome tabs
• Chrome apps
• Chrome extensions

You can use the task manager to troubleshoot when apps are frozen. If your Chromebook is frozen, a reboot will be better.

PS: I wasn’t sure if we can call this Chromebook’s Task Manager because it is the Chrome task manager with a few more options. This Chromebook help page from Samsung’s website made that decision easy.

Adding more information to the Task Manager

By default the Task Manager shows the following:

• Task
• Memory footprint
• CPU
• Network
• Process ID

You can, however, add more columns to view additional data. Here are some of the additional details available:

• Profile
• Swapped memory
• Image cache
• Script cache
• CSS cache
• GPU memory
• SQLite memory
• NaCl debug report
• JavaScript memory
• Idle wake ups
• File descriptors
• Process priority
• Keep alive count

To add new rows, right-click anywhere on the Task Manager and choose the item you want to add:

I hope you found this guide useful. Please drop us a comment if you have questions.