301–306 of 306 posts
> When any installed hosted app, packaged app, or extension has "background" permission, Chrome runs (invisibly) as soon as the user logs into their computer—before the user launches Chrome. The "background" permission also makes Chrome continue running (even after its last window is closed) until the user explicitly quits Chrome.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/mv2/declare_per...
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…
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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…
For those that didn't measure, it's almost irrelevant — I'm telling you it's not a subtle difference. It's night-and-day.
It's very low on my list of plausible theories, but if there was a hypothetical keystone exploit, what is the latest on code-injecting WindowServer?
Also added an FAQ to the site: https://chromeisbad.com/#faq to address the low-hanging fruit of obvious objections to the possibility that Chrome/keystone is doing something to the system to cause it to thrash.
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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 :)
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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 disc…
https://twitter.com/lorenb/status/1339372013232779264
“ Also, sincere apologies for any misleading language in the original post, coming down off my fury that this was possible (helps not wanting to hurl your mac through a wall).
Thanks to everyone for coming through now with samples/evidence.
Something's up, but I'll shut up now.“
Thanks, as always for the calming and wise guidance Dang.