I’ve been experimenting with automated web scraping using selenium and created a script that controls audio playback on websites. The problem is that I accidentally closed my Python program without properly shutting down the browser instance, and now there’s a background browser process that keeps playing music continuously.
I can hear the audio playing but I can’t see any visible browser windows since it was running in headless mode. The music won’t stop even after closing my terminal or IDE.
What’s the best way to locate and kill this hidden browser process? I’m worried about having phantom processes running in the background. Any suggestions on how to find and terminate it would be really helpful.
I encountered this exact issue when working with headless Chrome through Selenium. The phantom process usually stems from improper WebDriver cleanup. You can identify the rogue process by checking your system’s process list - look for chrome or chromedriver processes that are consuming CPU or have audio-related activity. On Windows, use Task Manager and sort by CPU usage or check the details tab for chrome.exe processes. On Linux/Mac, run ps aux | grep chrome to see all Chrome-related processes. Once identified, you can terminate it through the process manager or command line. For future prevention, always implement proper cleanup in your Selenium scripts using driver.quit() in a try-finally block or context manager. This ensures the browser process terminates even if your script encounters errors.
yup, task manager is a good start! also, open terminal and run pkill -f chrome if you’re on mac. it’ll kill any chrome processes erring like crazy after using selenium. i feel ya, it’s super annoying when this happens!
Had this happen to me multiple times during my web automation projects. The audio playing from a phantom browser is definitely annoying. What worked for me was checking the system audio mixer first - on Windows you can right-click the volume icon and select “Open Volume Mixer” to see which processes are currently outputting audio. This gives you the exact process name that’s playing the sound. Once you identify it there, you can go to Task Manager and end that specific process tree. Sometimes the process shows up under a generic name like “Web Content” or similar, but the audio mixer will point you to the right culprit. I’ve also noticed that these phantom processes sometimes take a few minutes to fully terminate after killing them, so don’t panic if the audio doesn’t stop immediately. Going forward, I always add signal handlers to my scripts to catch interruptions and clean up properly.