Continuing a tradition of making tools for family members, I made for my grandmother a simple Chrome extension that opens all the bookmarks in a folder at startup.

The extension code itself is nothing interesting (making the icon probably took longer). However, it does showcase a limitation of the current Chrome extension system. Since this extension needs to run code at startup, it needs a background page. The extension system architecture overview has a few more details, but briefly, background pages (and any other extension pages) end up in their own process. In this particular case, the background page is not needed after startup, but there is no way to indicate that, so the process hangs around indefinitely, wasting a bit of memory. There is a bug filed for this, part of a broader collection of changes that would enable certain classes of extensions to remove the need for (long-lived) background pages.