what is the process“Finder Web Content”？

Lewis Eisen wrote:

Still having this issue... I'm surprised no one from Apple has weighed in on this question yet.

Why are you suprised? Apple doesn't monitor these forums. There are moderators that take care of "terms of use" issues, and there are apple support people who try to answer questions that haven't been responded to in something like 24 hours or more, but other than that, Apple isn't here to respond to these questions. Just us users like you.

I've found the Safari Web Content process starts gobbling up RAM when you are viewing pages with a lot of flash-based content or other similar detritus.

I run Click-to-plugin to prevent most plug-ins from running without my permission, and I also use Javascript Blacklist to prevent Javascripts from running unnecessarily obtrusive web ads. I don't think Javascript Blacklist is available anymore, though.

Both of those seem to keep mine from going overboard, but I'm not certain it is the reason.

My issue was the "Finder Web Content"... it still pops up once in a while...

Yep. It is "Finder Web Content," that appears to be different from Safari Web Content. I can see both in the activity monitor and the FWC is the one running wild. In my particular situation, it runs wild when I have a couple of excel files open and cutting and pasting across them while also doing various sorts on them. That appears to be the only trigger. The only fix that I have is to keep activity monitor open and popping over there to force quit FWC.

I didn't have the Finder Web Content showing at all.

It only appears when Previewing documents in the Finder. It may go nuts if you have the file selected in the finder and you are modifying it, as you state--only a guess, though.

I don't see it going nuts, but that may depend on what you are doing. For me, it also shuts down after a while.

Do you have anything that modifies the Finder?

I had this issue today and I finally fixed it, I think. The process hasn't been a resource hog for about 45 minutes which is the longest I have gone without seeing the problem.

The Solution

• Open Disk Utility
• Click on Macintosh HD (or whatever you named your hard drive)
• Click Repair Disk Permissions, this takes a few minutes
• Click Verify Disk Permissions
• If there are any messages that come up showing a conflict then click Repair Disk Permissions
• Repeat this process until all permissions are repaired

I had to verify and repair 5-6 times but everything is better now. Hope this helps someone.

I'm having this issue right now when working with adobe photoshop, Finder Web Content up to %90 CPU. I'll try to Repair Disk Permissions and see what happens.

Sorry but this reply seems totally unrelated to my question.

-Joe

My issue was that this process was using a high percentage of CPU time. It ran for almost 24 hours on my work machine. I would force quit and it would just come back a few minutes later. I eventually figured out that it had to do with a permissions problem. I think that I had quite a few of these windows open and I might have posted the solution in the wrong thread. Hopefully it helps someone here.

chris6565 wrote:

I had this issue today and I finally fixed it, I think. The process hasn't been a resource hog for about 45 minutes which is the longest I have gone without seeing the problem.

The Solution

• Open Disk Utility
• Click on Macintosh HD (or whatever you named your hard drive)
• Click Repair Disk Permissions, this takes a few minutes
• Click Verify Disk Permissions
• If there are any messages that come up showing a conflict then click Repair Disk Permissions
• Repeat this process until all permissions are repaired

I had to verify and repair 5-6 times but everything is better now. Hope this helps someone.

Thanks Chris, It worked for now!

Running Repair Disk Permissions worked here too. There is no need to quit the Finder Web Content process while permissions are corrected; you can just leave it running. Once permissions are fixed the CPU usage drops.

If anyone who knows dtrace is seeing this issue I suspect Apple would appreciate a proper bug report.

This is the answer for me as well.

Thanks, Chris.

After trying everything including the disc repair option, I still had the issue. However I did realise that unchecking the show preview column did work after I reset finder as described in this post:

http://osxdaily.com/2013/11/13/fix-finder-slow-high-cpu-use-mac-os-x/

Ok, I don't have any preview icons in the screen, but the problem doesn't occur anymore and I rather have a working system then some fancy icons in my finder window.

I hope this works for anybody else and that Apple will come with a solution for this soon so that we can all use our macs as we are supposed to.

chris6565 wrote:

I had this issue today and I finally fixed it, I think. The process hasn't been a resource hog for about 45 minutes which is the longest I have gone without seeing the problem.

The Solution

• Open Disk Utility
• Click on Macintosh HD (or whatever you named your hard drive)
• Click Repair Disk Permissions, this takes a few minutes
• Click Verify Disk Permissions
• If there are any messages that come up showing a conflict then click Repair Disk Permissions
• Repeat this process until all permissions are repaired

I had to verify and repair 5-6 times but everything is better now. Hope this helps someone.

Chirs, thanks a lot.

This indeed helped, but I tried to open a Word document and there's still no preview in the Finder Is it like that for you? Then, also I did it looking at the Activity Monitor and I had the same Finder Web Content Issue. Then it solved bu itself, but that means it's still there.

Any clues?

I recently got this issue immediately after I associated a apple ID with my user account. May be this had caused the issue with disk permissions which in turn made the process (finder web content) to hog memory. Anyways, I removed the apple id from my account and repaired the disk permissions to resolve the issue.

I had this issue pop up just now when I was browsing through files in a OneDrive folder using a finder window with preview. I was trying to spot particular pdf document - I could remember what the cover looked like, but not the filename. So, as others have noted, this seems to be associated with the finder preview view. CPU use by the Finder Web Content process quickly dropped away to nothing when I stopped looking at document previews (ironically, this happened while I was searching the Apple Support Communities for a solution to the problem...). My MacBook Pro stopped panting like an exhausted dog soon after.