what is the process“Finder Web Content”？

This a profile oriented problem, you will see that if you login as a different user, you usually won't have the same problem. Forget about blaming MS Word, that's not it, it was also my first thought that MSWord running in Windows thru VMware Fusion was the culprit, nope it's not it, guaranteed. After hours of painstakingly troubleshooting the problem, I was able to permanently resolve it by simply rebooting the system in safemode. If you are using similar system like mine, Retina 15" McBookPro with 16GB ram, Maverick Mac O/S10.9.4, this what you have to do. POWER OFF your system "then" TURN IT ON while holding the shift key (left or right whichever you prefer), when you see the gray colored apple image on the screen before it finish booting, immediately release your finger off from the shift key, this what you call booting your system in SAFE MODE, what it does is it's loading your mac O/S with the native drivers and usually this process resolves a lot of computer software related problems.. You should be a able to see a horizontal process status bar, wait for it to boot,login as the user you have a problem with, by looking at the right top of your screen it should reflect that you are in "SAFE" mode. To make it even more better, though it's not necessary, run the disk utility and repair the permission. If you don't know how to run the permission repair, forget about it, just restart your system. This is how it resolved my system "out of application memory" problem.

To check, after rebooting your macbook, run the activity monitor, and select the memory process tab and observe your memory usage (RAM) when clicking the "Finder" as if you are looking and opening a file from your document folder. Go ahead, open a file, get ready to highlight the "finder web content" process and click on force quit (you may need the admit user and password if logged in as a different user) if your memory usage does not go as high as 95% of your memory capacity, you're good to go. Your problem is gone if you are not using slightly even more than 50% of your memory capacity, it flactuates after a reboot, without running any application yet. If you have 16GB of ram and the "finder web content" memory process is running on 6Gb + and your Kernel process is consuming 6GB also, wherein your 16GB memory is totally in use most likely an "application memory is full" error window screen will pop out already and the system will freeze, if that's the case, ask for an apple support. if you resolve it, send me an email: segovia.marlon@yahoo.com

Yes, this seems to be the thing with me as well... It's connected to previewing certain Word documents, those that contain a certain type of "image" (I don't know what they are, I didn't create them), which might be that canvas thing. They're basically images composed of various other objects, as if copied from a slide presentation, but which you cannot move or edit, and work only as a whole.

Anyways. I'm reviving this thread because this is still happening to me, and there does't seem to be a solution to it, so I wanted to know if you managed to fix it, Wildeidea =)

I am pretty sure that for at least some of us this is what causes the Finder Web Content to suddenly go crazy and slow the computer until you can't do anything because you can't even open the Activity Monitor. As this happens in a matter of seconds, and you don't even have to be on the Finder window (meaning, if I leave one of these 'undesirable documents' selected on finder after opening it and beginning reading in Word, It may all crash before you even realize what's happening.

And to Codling about Keep It Simple's solution: this IS NOT a solution. It's not effective, and it's **** impossible to work with this, it just fixes what is going to happen again and again. A half-assed solution is disabling preview in Finder, or even just disabling Word preview (possible, I read around there), but that's not really the optimal, because I wanna continue being able to enjoy the preview of documents...

Anyways. I'm reviving this thread because this is still happening to me, and there does't seem to be a solution to it, so I wanted to know if you managed to fix it, Wildeidea =)

I have not yet confirmed that disabling icon Previews as a fix yet, but it does seem to be an underlying theme. In that regard, note that Zheechen suggested

'Try disable Finder "Show preview column". Finder->View->Show View Options->uncheck "Show preview column".'

To which Codling said

'there seems to be an issue with the preview, but "Show Preview Column" seems to be missing in Mavericks'.

But actually, it is there in Mavericks, if you open a Finder window in Column view first, and then go

'Finder->View->Show View Options->uncheck "Show preview column" '.

This fixed it for me (though it was icon previews, not preview panel).

The solutions proposed in this post didn't work for me either, I tried many times for almost a week but finder keeps going crazy. I found this other solution that it looks like it worked so far

Going to the terminal and execute the command:

sudo rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist&&killall Finder

You might want to save the file somewhere before removing it, just in case 😉

sudo cp ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist ~/Desktop

This file contains all the settings of finder, so when you remove all the finder options are going to be reverted to default. Let me know if this works for you 😉