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WTF? Chromium (2016)

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Re: WTF? Chromium (2016)

#91

Post by dragonwriter »

FascinatedBox wrote: post #89
deathanatos wrote: post #88

1. I'm not seeing the causal link between the flag and the symptoms. I often find "Chrome" "causing" the same problems, but typically you can judge from the memory use that an errant tab is allocating the world, and you've started drawing on swap, which of course slows things down. But here we've cropped the memory stats out of the screenshot from top (for the system as a whole; we can see a few processes consuming a…

What other serious alternatives are out there though? I know of Firefox and Edge. But aren't Opera and Safari now reskins of Chromium, to some degree?

Blink (Chromium’s engine) was forked from WebKit (Safari’s Engine) and the two have developed separately. Safari is not a skin of Chromium or vice versa.

Re: WTF? Chromium (2016)

#92

Post by fulafel »

agl wrote: post #57
xg15 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And? All that is written in the article. The question is whether or not forcing users to partake in field trials is a good idea.

The piece seems to suggest that a) multiple processes were the performance problem and b) that a field trial was causing that and "mak[ing] my computer unusable". Multiple processes do take more memory, but there's a good reason for them. While it's possible that it was a field trial that was causing issues here, there's no evidence to support that. Sadly, it was probably just excessive resource usage independent of…

That TLS anecdote is pretty fascinating. Middleboxes are holding so much back on the internet. I wish the IETF didn't use such euphemisms as "middlebox robustness"!

I hope HN'ers push back against middleboxes at workplaces.

Re: WTF? Chromium (2016)

#93

Post by mcbits »

khedoros1 wrote: post #90
jkrems wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that question doesn't make sense. It contains the assumption that the alternative would be to never ship broken features to users. While the actual alternative would be that they'd ship the same broken feature to all users. Because at some point there's no other testing left.

If they're shipping features that need testing, it seems like the Beta version is the right place to ship them, not the stable Chrome or Chromium build. As in: ship the possibly-broken features to people who have already opted into testing, and don't subject your users that chose the "stable" to random testing. Getting the bad end of someone's unannounced feature testing is the kind of thing that makes me decide to u…

If they're not running new features through their Beta channel, then you have a point. Otherwise, I'd assume the features that make it to field trials have already gone through Beta testing and are thought to be ready to release--which isn't always the case, hence the gradual rollout.

Re: WTF? Chromium (2016)

#94

Post by [deleted] »

unethical_ban wrote: post #18
akerro wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And sadly, Firefox is the only browser that does this. Not any more, I recently discovered that my firefox at work got infected with Firefox Pioneer. I didn't install that, it just appeared on list of my addons, no warning or anything. I heard on Reddit about similar cases from a few months ago, people got Safe Browsing installed without their knowledge. Both are signed addons from Mozilla. https://addons.mozilla.or…

>at work Is youre IT group policy doing this?

[deleted]

Re: WTF? Chromium (2016)

#95

Post by akerro »

unethical_ban wrote: post #18
akerro wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And sadly, Firefox is the only browser that does this. Not any more, I recently discovered that my firefox at work got infected with Firefox Pioneer. I didn't install that, it just appeared on list of my addons, no warning or anything. I heard on Reddit about similar cases from a few months ago, people got Safe Browsing installed without their knowledge. Both are signed addons from Mozilla. https://addons.mozilla.or…

>at work Is youre IT group policy doing this?

Small company, we don't have such policies, root account on my PC at work belongs to me. It's Ubuntu.

your

Re: WTF? Chromium (2016)

#96

Post by kodablah »

arunc wrote: post #85

Is chromium builds available on Windows (not Google's chrome)?

Shameless plug, my browser is: https://cretz.github.io/doogie/. I do no telemetry, surprise feature testing, etc. There are of course others, the best of which is Ungoogled Chromium, but they are a bit behind on their updates.

Re: WTF? Chromium (2016)

#97

Post by Vinnl »

akerro wrote: post #13
mariusmg wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>even if it is slightly slower than Chromium Funny thing is Firefox Quantum is both faster and eats less memory compared with Chrome. >not one that treats you as a pawn. And sadly, Firefox is the only browser that doesn't treat you like a pawn. For MS, Google, Apple, that chinese company which owns Opera you are just a pawn. (later edit : fixed the second remark).

>And sadly, Firefox is the only browser that does this. Not any more, I recently discovered that my firefox at work got infected with Firefox Pioneer. I didn't install that, it just appeared on list of my addons, no warning or anything. I heard on Reddit about similar cases from a few months ago, people got Safe Browsing installed without their knowledge. Both are signed addons from Mozilla. https://addons.mozilla.or…

> Participation is voluntary, and you can remove yourself by disabling the add-on after you install it.

So it sounds like a bug or another case of non-malice. Tried reporting it at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/?

Re: WTF? Chromium (2016)

#98

Post by friendzis »

deathanatos wrote: post #88

1. I'm not seeing the causal link between the flag and the symptoms. I often find "Chrome" "causing" the same problems, but typically you can judge from the memory use that an errant tab is allocating the world, and you've started drawing on swap, which of course slows things down. But here we've cropped the memory stats out of the screenshot from top (for the system as a whole; we can see a few processes consuming a…

Regarding point 2: what if Tesla pushed silent OTA updates for A/B test that accidentally disabled ABS or traction control, rendering the car unusable?

This is what I cannot grasp about modern software project management/ops. The only relevant measure is time to ship. If the unit tests pass it is good to go. So many times have I seen webapps so broken that core functions do not even load or by no means would pass simple "click here and there" usability test. In house QA sometimes seems to be abandoned. Automated testing is a good thing, but in my book shipping comes with implicit assertion that changes perform the task at least on a basic level.

Field A/B testing of experimental features is a good thing, which I am ok with even if I happen to get worse alternative. Shipping outright broken features if I am not on beta/testing/nightly release channel is unacceptable.

Re: WTF? Chromium (2016)

#99

Post by csydas »

magicalist wrote: post #68
trafficlight wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the post is that there is no way to opt out. We all understand more datapoints the better. But I also need to not be fucked with when I'm trying to work.

> But I also need to not be fucked with when I'm trying to work. But that's true of shipping any bug and isn't guaranteed to happen with a field trial any more than any new feature. (and the OP doesn't seem to establish that it has anything to do with the field trial, just that the processes were run with that option? Admittedly I don't know how they actually work :)

I think the point is more about intentional performance degredation versus unintentional; it makes sense that you can't ship a 100% bug proof piece of relatively complex software, and some has to be patched out later, but such performance degredation or workflow interruptions can be planned for. But to intentionally enable an function which knowingly degrades performance or impedes workflows just for the sake of testing without the consent of the user is a bit rude. To repeat the author and other comments, if it were a beta-channel or test build where it was clear this was part of the intended functionality of the build, I don't think we'd be having this discussion.

Re: WTF? Chromium (2016)

#100

Post by khedoros1 »

mcbits wrote: post #93
khedoros1 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're shipping features that need testing, it seems like the Beta version is the right place to ship them, not the stable Chrome or Chromium build. As in: ship the possibly-broken features to people who have already opted into testing, and don't subject your users that chose the "stable" to random testing. Getting the bad end of someone's unannounced feature testing is the kind of thing that makes me decide to u…

If they're not running new features through their Beta channel, then you have a point. Otherwise, I'd assume the features that make it to field trials have already gone through Beta testing and are thought to be ready to release--which isn't always the case, hence the gradual rollout.

I'd say that if they're doing A/B testing or "field trials", then they aren't sure enough to roll the feature out to Stable. That's not Google's policy, though.

They run experiments in Canary, Dev, and Beta, then conduct a roll-out to stable to get a broader test (per the explanation here): https://textslashplain.com/2017/10/18/chrome-field-trials/

I'm just grumpy that we don't live in the perfect world, where confusion-inducing processes like this wouldn't be necessary. I've never been that comfortable with the "break a few eggs" method of progress.

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