title: Why does selenium chromedriver use less resources than regular chrome
body: <p>I have noticed that when launching chrome with fresh user data directories via selenium chromedriver it is using up much less resources (cpu, memory, and disk) than when launching normally.</p>
  
  <p>One of the reasons I was able to find out was that selenium chromedriver launches with these arguments:</p>
  
  <pre><code>--disable-background-networking
  --disable-client-side-phishing-detection
  --disable-default-apps
  --disable-hang-monitor
  --disable-popup-blocking
  --disable-prompt-on-repost
  --disable-sync
  --disable-web-resources
  --enable-automation
  --enable-logging
  --force-fieldtrials=SiteIsolationExtensions/Control
  --ignore-certificate-errors
  --log-level=0
  --metrics-recording-only
  --no-first-run
  --password-store=basic
  --test-type=webdriver 
  --use-mock-keychain
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>After applying those arguments, cpu, memory, and disk usage have massively gone down. However, disk usage is still about 10x higher. Using Windows Resource Monitor, I analyzed the I/O usage and saw a lot of writing to chrome_url_fetcher directory and another directory with two random 5 digit numbers seperated by a underscore; RANDOMNUMBER_RANDOMNUMBER. Both of these directories were in the %temp% folder and contained files that included "pepperflashplayer" in their names.</p>
  
  <p>I am assuming that this is chrome installing a necessary component for pepperflash, but why is this not the case with selenium chromedriver? Is there any way I can stop this?</p>