I don’t know about the author’s claims, but I find Google Chrome unusable on my Ubuntu laptop. Whenever it’s running, my fan is blasting. If I clear the Chrome cache, this fixes it for a while, but it’s not long before it starts exercising the CPU again.
Chrome Is Bad
101–110 of 306 posts
Re: Chrome Is Bad
#102This should not be the #1 story on HN right now. :(
It's a single anecdote that deleting Chrome on two computers sped them up. It provides zero evidence (even anecdotal) that it has anything to do with "Keystone" specifically. It provides zero evidence for the idea that "Keystone" is able to "nefariously hide itself from Activity Monitor". And it also completely contradicts the normal user experience of Chrome, which is that most people's computers don't slow down after a Chrome install. (WindowServer on my MBP usually uses Why is this nonsense being upvoted? I get people dislike Google and Chrome, but wouldn't it be better to stick to things backed by real evidence?
Re: Chrome Is Bad
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>To make an argument of this scale you have the burden of proof. There is no proof here past casual correlation. And yet, as of this writing, it has 200+ upvotes and is at the top of the front page. HN audience really needs to do better. If you are reading this and are one of the people who upvoted the story, please really ask yourself why.
Oh this is normal. People upvote the title, then comment, then read it if the comments aren’t agreeing with their preconception. Humans are a mess of a species.
Sounds like a design issue. Why does the front page have an upvote button if we expect people to read the post/article first?
Re: Chrome Is Bad
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>To make an argument of this scale you have the burden of proof. There is no proof here past casual correlation. And yet, as of this writing, it has 200+ upvotes and is at the top of the front page. HN audience really needs to do better. If you are reading this and are one of the people who upvoted the story, please really ask yourself why.
Chrome lives in the causal consumer world. Many of us believe, with some justice, the causalization of computers has been to the diminishment of power users. Therefore chrome bad gets hundreds of upvotes. I guarantee you not everyone read the entire article, and then ran their own diagnostic CPU benchmarking to verify the results, and also compared it against chrome competitors. It's more like the common folk like ch…
I surely hope chrome lives in a causal world, a non-aristotelian world would be confusing. (Just me being an ass, I know you meant casual)
Re: Chrome Is Bad
#105Keystone is the hidden nefarious program that apple installs as its been clearly stated to convert intel into arm code lol
You are thinking of Rosetta.
Re: Chrome Is Bad
#106The author went so far as to create a domain for this rant, and yet didn't even do any performance metrics or basic forensic analysis at all. I'm not saying the author is wrong, but there's a lot of questions here. How does Keystone hide itself from the Activity Monitor? Is there a Keystone process if you run `ps aux`? Did you run dtruss/strace? What is it doing when Chrome isn't running that causes it to degrade per…
Because this sounded outlandish, I decided to have a look on my own system. Since the author didn't give any technical details, I grepped `~/Library` and `/Library` for files containing `keystone` in either name or contents. This yielded the following interesting candidates, along with similar entries for daemons etc: ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.agent.plist ~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleS…
> I can't help but wonder what the motivation behind making this page was.
Why would you immediately jump to assuming bad faith?
No grand conspiracy required... the author believes that Chrome is slowing down his Mac and decided to share it. The end.
Re: Chrome Is Bad
#107The window to the internet should not be some monster that takes millions of developer hours and held ransom by a couple of big companies. I should be able to build my own browser in a 3 month sabbatical.
> The window to the internet This exact part of your comment is why big companies are fighting so hard to own and gatekeep web browsers.
> big companies are fighting so hard to own and gatekeep web browsers
could you expand on this? Which big companies are you referring to?
Re: Chrome Is Bad
#108The author should probably note that not updating Chrome is a very bad idea. There's a good reason for automated updates on a web browser for the general public and there's a good reason why Chrome is the most secure browser on the market.
It could autoupdate when running/on launch though. No idea why Google litters my system with weird backgroundtasks, unless it's to get a few more datapoints on me..
Re: Chrome Is Bad
#109I've had noticeable issues with "WindowServer" in the past (taking 80% CPU usage and causing the fans to ramp up even when the system seemed like it should be idling even after a reboot) so I decided to give this a shot. This is anecdotal but there is a noticeable difference for me with responsiveness after following these steps. Currently the WindowServer process is hovering around 14%.
Most likely the issue was resolved by the reboot, not by uninstalling Chrome. From my experience Mac OS tends to slow down after a few days. Animations and scrolling gets choppy and there's nothing I can do to fix it, short of rebooting.
Re: Chrome Is Bad
#110A lot of skeptical comments in this thread. I'm not low-level enough to confirm or deny the specific claims in the article. I will say that my experience with regards to CPU performance "leaks" and Chrome seeming to always be running in the background even when I didn't want it to, as well as Chrome starting up on system startup when there didn't seem to be any references to it anywhere I'd expect to cause that, are…
What is running in the background/on startup, Chrome itself or its updater? And is this on macOS or another platform?