title: Chromedriver: How to disable Google Chrome Helper
body: <p>I'm running 10 chromedriver browsers on a mac, each using 1 tab, but which somehow have spawned 98 Google Chrome Helpers. These helpers are eating up my available memory, and severely limiting what hardware I can run these tests on.</p>
  
  <p>The internet seems to be in mass agreement that google chrome helper can be disabled by going to /settings/content settings/plugins, then selecting the "Click to play" option. </p>
  
  <p>However, that option does not appear to exist in the current version of chrome. Instead the three options are:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Run all plugin content 
  Detect and run important plugin content
  Let me choose when to run plugin content (which is assume is the equivalent)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>To attempt to get the latter option as my default setting I created a blank folder, then ran this in the terminal</p>
  
  <pre><code>/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --user-data-dir=/Users/User/Documents/Python/chome_helper_blank_folder
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I can confirm the settings I change in this instance stick, and opening up a new instance in this fashion launches with the settings I last established. </p>
  
  <p>I am getting this error on launch, but it doesn't appear to be affecting :</p>
  
  <pre><code>2016-08-23 08:55:48.149 Google Chrome[556:16791] NSWindow warning: adding an unknown subview: &lt;FullSizeContentView: 0x7fc703e84f80&gt;. Break on NSLog to debug.
  2016-08-23 08:55:48.149 Google Chrome[556:16791] Call stack:
  (
      "+callStackSymbols disabled for performance reasons"
  (
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>In addition to the above setting, I navigated to </p>
  
  <pre><code> chrome://plugins/
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and disabled the 4 plugins displaying.</p>
  
  <p>Unfortunately, 3 chrome helpers per browser still appear at browser launch.</p>
  
  <p>When I use the following python commands, chrome launches with the settings I established above, but the chrome helpers are still there as well. </p>
  
  <pre><code>chome_helper_blank_folder_path = "/Users/User/Documents/Python/chome_helper_blank_folder"
  chrome_options = Options()
  chrome_options.add_argument("user-data-dir="+chome_helper_blank_folder_path)
  driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=chrome_options)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is there any way to get rid of google chrome helper with chromedriver?</p>