If you find a bug in Chrome then I'm sure the team would like to know about it. We even have a website for reporting bugs in Chrome - crbug.com. Filing a bug there isn't as flashy as creating a website but it is probably more effective.
Chrome Is Bad
221–230 of 306 posts
Re: Chrome Is Bad
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the security industry it's commonly known Chrome has the best security, this partly due to the amount of money Google invests in finding vulnerabilities (via fuzzing) in Chrome. For "proof", you can check how much exploit vendors pay for exploits for each browser. For example Zerodium offer: * $500k for Chrome RCE * $100k for Safari RCE * $100k for Firefox RCE https://zerodium.com/program.html The higher amount wo…
Chrome has about 70 percent market share and this higher amount may accounts for that.
Well in the US[0] it's
Chrome 46.17% Safari 37.83% Firefox 3.7%
Worldwide[1] it's: Chrome 63.54% Safari 19.24% Firefox 3.79%
I was a bit shocked to see how low FF is. It's exploits are being valued the same as Safari.
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/united-s... [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2020...
Re: Chrome Is Bad
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
And it can update itself without sudo?
Yes, since the cron script automatically runs as root on a repeating schedule. If you want to see what it does: mkdir junk cd junk wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb ar x google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb tar xf data.tar.xz cat opt/google/chrome/cron/google-chrome It's not nefarious - it's well-documented and explained. It's just making a decision for me that, as an ad…
That is very bad.
With this they can easily and covertly target an ip and deploy automatically a rooted version to infiltrate a specific computer.
That looks like crazy theory, but tell me what they will do if the nsa request it?
Re: Chrome Is Bad
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
While it's indeed unlikely that there is deliberately hiding, there is a chance that the google updater triggers something in some (OS-level) components via some (implicit) IPC mechanism that causes load spikes in those components. You'd hardly see any load for the real culprit itself but those other connected components may run hot. This user says their WindowServer runs hot. Some Chrome-related software may have en…
True, that much is possible . But fairly unlikely, especially since Chrome's updater normally does not even pop up a GUI. We'd need stronger evidence than "I deleted some Google stuff and rebooted and now feels faster". I suppose the author did claim to have reproduced it on two computers, but only once each, and with no objective performance measurements. Sadly, there are a lot of things that can make macOS 'randoml…
Well, the author is blaming it on the updater kinda, but it could have been chrome itself or the updater might be trying to create a window for whatever purpose in a tight loop or do something else that somehow ends up eventually calling into the WindowServer. There are plenty of things that can go wrong.
I had my own run in with chrome recently where dwm.exe (Desktop Windows Manager on win10) would eat and eat memory until everything OOM'ed. Didn't use much CPU tho. I eventually tracked it down to a single chrome tab that had a specific website open. It's reproducible at least on my system but I haven't yet had the time to look into it more thoroughly. If I had to guess, it was the website making Chrome use some "hardware layers/surfaces" or something like that and cause the corresponding buffers in dwm to be retained forever. No idea if it's a chrome bug or a dwm bug or even some kind of driver bug, and just closing the tab was enough as a "quick fix".
Re: Chrome Is Bad
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Asking the question "wonder" is not really assuming bad faith is it? I don't see any intentional deception there.
The page says " I deleted Chrome, and all the files Keystone had littered on the computer, restarted, and it was so snappy it felt like a brand new computer. Yeah, I realize this sounds like a freakin' infomercial, but it worked so well I spent $5 on a domain name and set up this website even if it makes me sound like a raving nut. " To then "wonder what the motivation is" is to suggest that you don't believe this si…
Yeah, there was no super master plan here, just that after dealing with one sluggish computer for days (you name it, I tried it), and another one for 5 years... the fact that it turned out to be slow because of an app that wasn't even running was pretty frustrating.
Filing a bug report that would get "works on my machine"'d and then ignored and auto-closed by a bot in 5 years didn't quite feel worthy.
Auto-updating browsers are a good idea. Keystone is bad auto-updating software. It should probably get scrapped.
Re: Chrome Is Bad
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Appears website is newer - https://twitter.com/lorenb/status/1337832978253230081
Huh. Chromeisbad.com doesn't have an author credit, but the tweet implies it's by notable iOS developer Loren Brichter, creator of Tweetie, Letterpress, and inventor of pull-to-refresh.
Yeah, it felt weird to put my name on it, people usually do that when they have something to sell. Someone mentioned that it seems sketchy being anonymous so I'll probably sign it.
There's no upside for me either way.
Re: Chrome Is Bad
#227This 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…
This is a fair comment.
At the same time even "hard" evidence would likely get dismissed as anecdotal, and there's certainly enough of it now (and even plenty in the past) to point a clear finger at Chrome/Keystone.
This certainly beat filing it in the black hole that is Chromium's bug reporter where it would have been ignored / works-on-my-machine'd / or dismissed as anecdotal there.
Whatever it is doing is sketchy and causing WindowServer to thrash. And this is not the first sketchy thing it has done.
Re: Chrome Is Bad
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
And it can update itself without sudo?
Yes, since the cron script automatically runs as root on a repeating schedule. If you want to see what it does: mkdir junk cd junk wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb ar x google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb tar xf data.tar.xz cat opt/google/chrome/cron/google-chrome It's not nefarious - it's well-documented and explained. It's just making a decision for me that, as an ad…
% ls /opt/google/chrome/cron/google-chrome
ls: cannot access '/opt/google/chrome/cron/google-chrome': No such file or directory
Re: Chrome Is Bad
#229I recently started to use Edge. It is funny that YouTube couldn't detect my identity, so it will ask me to login in almost every video I play, and it won't display any comments for videos. If I want to read comments, I will have to switch to Chrome. YouTube behaves very strangely when you are not using Chrome. I do see many times WindowServer would be at 40%-50% CPU usage, it happens fairly often. I might just delete…
Strange, I switched to Brave in the beginning of the year and it's pretty much chrome with stronger controls around cookies, trackers, etc.
Youtube works just like it did under Chrome.
Re: Chrome Is Bad
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
So users are expected to run debugger tools in order to figure out what some hidden program is doing? Many years back I couldn't sleep and noticed my HDD's was working hard. I checked and it was google updater that was scanning everything... I will never know why, they might be stealing IP (i was working on OCR at the time) or they just wanted to create a profile to serve better ads...
How else do you expect to figure out what a program is doing? Should it make a pop up with a stack trace from time to time?
Maybe a notification of what it is doing. "We are using your computer for machine learning" or "Currently upgrading Chrome". Or some sort of documentation on what the program is supposed to do.