What the "H" is Chrome and Firefox doing ??

[Tom Horsley]

> Hard Drive runs constantly,

I don't get quite the blockage described in the original post,
but certainly when I start google-chrome for the very first
time after a reboot, it spends vast amounts of time rattling
the disk, which I assume has something to do with all the
cached data it stashed in my home directory since my system
disk is an SSD and doesn't rattle :-).

It takes a long time for the bookmarks and icons in the
bookmark menu entries to show up.

This is starting it with a blank page as the initial
home screen, so no web sites are involved.