Google Chrome

What is "Google Chrome Helper (Aperitif)"?

ngyikp

— 1 min read
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When I opened Activity Monitor, I saw an interesting 'Aperitif' suffix to the usual Google Chrome Helper.

Activity Monitor showing many Google Chrome Helper processes suffixed with 'Aperitif'

I thought it was a text display bug because processes on macOS could change their 'process name' on Activity Monitor (for some reason), but these are real executables on the disk.

Folder contents of the Helpers folder in Google Chrome Dev

Right now, there are zero search results for "Google Chrome Helper (Aperitif)" so I had a feeling this might be an initial rollout to dev/canary users.

The feeling of despair when you get zero search results for something that feels like public knowledge

Luckily, Chromium is open source so we can search in the codebase for the mysterious Aperitif keyword.

Chromium Code Search

The comments for the two files aperitif_mac.h and aperitif_mac.cc basically state that Apéritif is a security sandbox feature, mystery solved.

The Chromium issue tracker showed the timeline of the issue: it has been in the works since 2022 but rolled back due to issues, now they are retrying again after increasing the macOS minimum version.

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