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Chrome Is Bad

chromeisbad.com

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Re: Chrome Is Bad

#291

Post by ghshephard »

dang wrote: post #273
silexia wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hundreds of people commented and how many tens of thousands read it first though? Reminds me of the moderation problem big tech companies face. Humans are prone to confirmation bias which means that when they read inaccurate information that confirms a bias it even further twist people's brains. For example, this article likely twisted thousands of people just a little further against Google even with though there wa…

That's a different and much harder problem. I don't think there's a way around it. Community mechanisms need time for people to evaluate what they're looking at. It's also an old problem - the adage "A lie flies around the world while the truth is still getting its trousers on" traces back to Jonathan Swift: Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late;…

The interesting thing here is I follow Loren on twitter - and he has dozens of credible people repeating the experiment and getting the same result, including people that I would consider unimpeachable sources such as:

https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1338412989473382400

Re: Chrome Is Bad

#292

Post by astrange »

jbverschoor wrote: post #244
astrange wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re having visible performance problems, file a report with Feedback Assistant. It’s ok if it seems to be a 3rd party app causing the issue. (High CPU use isn’t necessarily a real performance issue and might be caused by just having Activity Monitor open.)

Apple does not support or fix third party apps. This is 100% chrome, with their annoying updating agent, which you can't remove

Apple likes it when the products they sell work properly and would like to hear about it when common third party products are causing that to not happen.

Re: Chrome Is Bad

#293

Post by wnevets »

coldtea wrote: post #282
wnevets wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont see any apple related post on the front page, let alone negative ones. Do you see a different front page than I do?

Yes, it's called "bias blind spot" :-) Here's one in the front page, just a few days ago: Falling Out of Love with Apple, Part 3: Content and Censorship (hardware.substack.com) 321 points by zherbert 7 days ago | flag | hide | 292 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2020-12-07

Wait, so we went from every third post on HN is a negative post about apple to here is one post from 7 days ago? Talk about "bias blind spot".

Re: Chrome Is Bad

#294

Post by [deleted] »

Elijen wrote: post #286
rot25 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those of you who are unaware, Comex is one of the most respected security researchers of all time and has done extensive research into Chrome and won Pwn2Own multiple times. He is completely correct, keystone is just Chrome's auto updater. The technical content of this article is super thin. This shouldn't be on the top of hacker news.

Oh the good old argument by authority.

[deleted]

Re: Chrome Is Bad

#295

Post by dang »

ghshephard wrote: post #291
dang wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a different and much harder problem. I don't think there's a way around it. Community mechanisms need time for people to evaluate what they're looking at. It's also an old problem - the adage "A lie flies around the world while the truth is still getting its trousers on" traces back to Jonathan Swift: Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late;…

The interesting thing here is I follow Loren on twitter - and he has dozens of credible people repeating the experiment and getting the same result, including people that I would consider unimpeachable sources such as: https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1338412989473382400

Well, I agree—that's interesting. It implies that something real is happening, though not that the OP's interpretation was accurate. It often happens in such cases that the observation is right but the interpretation is wrong [1]. It's when the interpretation rushes into angry denunciation, and especially a campaign using baity tricks to rile people up, that fair-minded readers start to have adverse reactions.

A discussion oriented more around a question (what explains this odd phenomenon?) could be a good thing. A more neutral submission, with a less baity title, might get a different reception from the community. But the combination of overstated claims and baity denunciation is usually going to trigger an immune response.

[1] I have no idea if it's wrong or not, just that a lot of informed commenters reacted that way.

Re: Chrome Is Bad

#296

Post by aasasd »

comex wrote: post #14

This is total nonsense. Even for malware, hiding from Activity Monitor would be quite a feat. Short of an exploit, you couldn't hide your process without a kernel rootkit, but macOS has required user approval to load kernel extensions for several versions now. I suppose you could go the low-tech way and just name your process "WindowServer" to confuse the user, but you'd still end up with two WindowServers. The idea…

Afaik you don't need to hide from the monitor to cause load by WindowServer while staying silent yourself. You just need to do graphics-intensive stuff. WindowServer then shows up as the manifestation of graphics being processed.

In fact, Un-googled Chromium (without the autoupdater) easily causes load that's displayed as WindowServer's, for me—when I open a Youtube video on my oldish Macbook with a shitty integrated video card. However there's little chance that I would think this to be caused by something else.

Re: Chrome Is Bad

#297

Post by icemelt8 »

leggenda47 wrote: post #142
crazygringo wrote: post #102

This 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…

My WindowServer usage was over 90% before but it went back down to under 10% after I did what he said. I also only needed it to test one site I was developing. I had the exact same things he did: MBP slow even when nothing is running, WindowServer always running high. So I think I can vouch for it being true. It seems to have worked for me also. EDIT: Maybe it's just placebo. I checked the CPU usage on WindowServer b…

I also agree, I had the same problem, and this solution solved it.

Re: Chrome Is Bad

#298

Post by tripzilch »

lorenb wrote: post #226
mortenjorck wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hopefully the upside has been learning to do a bit more investigation, provide a bit more evidence, before registering a domain for your theory and submitting to HN :)

Re: Chrome Is Bad

#299

Post by tripzilch »

sbarre wrote: post #89
systemvoltage wrote: post #75

The 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.

> > 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.

Yes. And it goes even further, it's also why they're working hard to destroy the WWW, and have everybody silo-d into their app.

It's why on most social/media networks you can't really link to anything. Why they're dressing down the address bar so that people don't see (and learn about!) URLs any more. Or learn about their use, that they are one of the fundamental building blocks of what was the WWW.

Although there's more, they already burned some parts of the woods before attacking the WWW. Do you remember there was a time when almost all of the popular instant messaging protocols were supported in ONE (free, non-tracking, non-ad infested) app (and there was even a choice of such apps: Pidgin, Trillian, Miranda ..).

Some of them could even talk to each other. It's crazy to imagine, but ultimately even more crazy is that we don't have this any more!!

They won the instant messaging war, it was pretty silent in fact. Just wasn't as ingrained as the WWW used to be. They had to wean the users off slowly, which is exactly what they're doing right now.

The time is coming but not yet. If they could, they would completely do away with the browser and just have their own apps. All the browser represents to them is a liability; an opportunity to click away and leave their platform for another.

Re: Chrome Is Bad

#300

Post by vim-guru »

I'm starting to think that there's some truth to OP's accusations. The fan on my MacBook has had a tendency to spin like crazy and it's been quite unresponsive at times for it's spec and age. When this post came out, I went for it and deleted it all and it's been acting surprisingly more responsive. Doing a conference-call used to kick of the fan after about a minute or so, the fan doesn't make a sound at all now. I've put in an order for an M1, but I think dropping Chrome (Canary in my case) could have been a worthwhile solution.

To add to my suspicion. A month or so ago, I was running Big Sur beta and was asked to give a system service from Google, admin access and restart. That in turn broke my Mac, so I had to spend hours to get back up and running. Why does the service require admin-access? Why did it require me to restart my computer?

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