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How Chrome ate 21GB of storage

blog.francoismaillet.com

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Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage

#41

I feel like it's slightly dishonest not to mention that (according to the Chrome devs) this problem is caused by poorly-behaved modifications to the Chrome installer made by third-party redistributors, and not by Chrome itself. (Disclosure: I work for Google, but not on Chrome.)

[deleted]

Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage

#42
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd much rather you use 21GB on my SSD than 2.1GB of my ram.

Hm. On some machines I only have 8x the SSD as RAM. I might take the 2.1GB to 21GB trade in that case :-).

Then don't use Chrome on those machines?

Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage

#43

I'm going to post a theory that with 500Gb drives pretty much the normal size that most people won't notice 2.5% tied up in Chrome installs.

Even with 1TB disk space I'm resentful of the amount of space "leaked" by software. Maybe I'm a naz-, maybe I was born in the MB era.. can't say. The other day I booted a P3 era machine and seeing all we did with "just" 128MB made me feel chills all over.

I blame the perpetual-beta mentality along with lazy development practices.

Used to be, we specced out exactly what was in a release and no more. Now, it's just whatever they can cram in under a deadline without all that "unnecessary" optimization.

I'm probably as guilty as anyone else; I like getting a paycheck and so I keep my mouth shut, even though shit like that literally keeps me up some nights.

Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd much rather you use 21GB on my SSD than 2.1GB of my ram.

It's usually easier to reclaim RAM than storage. Which application am I not using right now? vs What data will I never need again?

Previous versions of chrome...

Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Embarrassing, obvious, multi-year bugs are common to all browsers though. In Firefox, bookmarklets on CSP pages have been broken for 3.5 years and counting, with the end nowhere in sight. A handful of bugs that have taken a while to fix is no way to judge the overall quality of the browser.

It's been a loooooooong time since I've seen the last useful bookmarklet in the wild. Un-useful, however, was stuff that tried to hijack your FB/Twitter ("hey guys paste this in ur browser and get some n00dz in return"). The amounts of crazy stuff people do for supposed nudes or whatever is just astonishing

I have one in my work browser to redirect a journal’s website example.com to example.com.library.university.example.net in order to get the full access. Having a simple button for this made my life a lot easier, though I admit that it is somewhat of an unusual case.

Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage

#47
post #38

Does this only occur on Macs?

If you're using packages on Linux, the package manager is responsible for uninstalling the old version. For example, yum/dnf on Fedora/Redhat will only keep one version of a package during 'yum update' (with the exception of the kernel, where the most recent 3 versions as well as the running kernel are kept to avoid breaking boot).

Yeah, I'm on Xubuntu and I figured this would be handled by the package manager.

Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage

#48
post #15

I feel like it's slightly dishonest not to mention that (according to the Chrome devs) this problem is caused by poorly-behaved modifications to the Chrome installer made by third-party redistributors, and not by Chrome itself. (Disclosure: I work for Google, but not on Chrome.)

> I feel like it's slightly dishonest not to mention that (according to the Chrome devs) this problem is caused by poorly-behaved modifications to the Chrome installer made by third-party redistributors, and not by Chrome itself. What do you mean ? if I download Chrome from the official website I get a third party installer ? because I have the exact same problem with that very official installer.

Oddly the author leaves out any mention of possibilities along these lines.

Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage

#49
post #15

I feel like it's slightly dishonest not to mention that (according to the Chrome devs) this problem is caused by poorly-behaved modifications to the Chrome installer made by third-party redistributors, and not by Chrome itself. (Disclosure: I work for Google, but not on Chrome.)

> I feel like it's slightly dishonest not to mention that (according to the Chrome devs) this problem is caused by poorly-behaved modifications to the Chrome installer made by third-party redistributors, and not by Chrome itself. What do you mean ? if I download Chrome from the official website I get a third party installer ? because I have the exact same problem with that very official installer.

It looks like the linked article has been updated at the end to clarify.

It sounds like some third party extension's installer (e.g. DivX) is reaching into Chrome.app and mucking with permissions (setting owner to root). Not sure why they don't install into "/Library/Internet Plug-Ins" (maybe it doesn't work with chrome anymore?)

(Edit: but a comment in the linked bug report suggests that this may also occur if Chrome is installed as one user and used by another.)

Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a loooooooong time since I've seen the last useful bookmarklet in the wild. Un-useful, however, was stuff that tried to hijack your FB/Twitter ("hey guys paste this in ur browser and get some n00dz in return"). The amounts of crazy stuff people do for supposed nudes or whatever is just astonishing

I have one in my work browser to redirect a journal’s website example.com to example.com.library.university.example.net in order to get the full access. Having a simple button for this made my life a lot easier, though I admit that it is somewhat of an unusual case.

You can admit it: it’s sci-hub
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