My guess was that it was some kind of count of the number of messages passed between the different chrome processes - but it probably grows way too fast for tha

My guess was that it was some kind of count of the number of messages passed between the different chrome processes - but it probably grows way too fast for that to be the case. I found this post: http://www.sorcerers-isle.net/article/goats_teleported.html http://www.sorcerers-isle.net/article/goats_teleported.html which does take a look at the source code. Although that doesn't reveal the intention behind the counter, my guess is that it was perhaps done to test the updating of the task manager.