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The weirdest bug I've seen yet

engineering.gusto.com

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Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#241

Post by generationP »

to11mtm wrote: post #181
generationP wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? How does a video card affect printing?

One of the ways to print things (especially on windows) is Via GDI. [0] Basically using the OS's rendering to make a raster that is then sent to the printer. The main thing the printer's driver does in this case is know how to take the bitmap and tell the printer to print the bitmap (i.e. chunking data and/or sliding the right commands into the bitmap stream) Contrast to, say, PostScript which allow for more compact…

Interesting! So that's why I used to get crappily rasterized printouts of PDFs in Chrome a few years ago.

I had thought printers could be trusted with their own rendering, but of course that is another can of worms...

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#242

Post by masswerk »

crazygringo wrote: post #131

tl;dr: a certain GIF would crash a Chrome tab, but only when the desktop version of Grammarly was installed. (Not a Chrome extension.) That's insane! Can anyone think by what possible mechanism the installation of Grammarly could affect whether a .gif file would crash Chrome? The company seems to be on Macs since they report that the problem doesn't surface in Safari. Is there some kind of dynamically-linked GIF deco…

Maybe, the GIF contains a text comment and Grammarly not only accesses this, but also alters it (for whatever reason), thus overwriting the file in a way in memory that offsets in the GIF file or its in-memory representation are violated?

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#243

Post by noizejoy »

OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #180
sfink wrote: post #167

Next time this happens, I recommend just letting people use a different browser. Firefox in particular has gotten much better at importing bookmarks, passwords, etc. from Chrome. It was a Sign from the universe that it was time to make the switch. Who are we to reject Signs? (Full disclosure: I'm an engineer on Firefox. But that has nothing whatsoever to do with my advice here, no siree Bob, not in the least.)

As an engineer, yes Firefox is a good solution As a PM, we spent 4 months making the onboard easier, and now you want people to install a new browser?

Having multiple browsers as a standard installation and employee training is an investment in business continuity.

And business continuity investment is like insurance: A waste until you need it.

Too much monoculture is short sighted and long term expensive.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#244

Post by dev_slash_null »

codethief wrote: post #197
gelatocar wrote: post #152

As I was reading this I was thinking to myself "I wonder if it is grammarly related" because I experienced a bug some time ago that presented itself in a similar way. It was impossible to reproduce but affecting lots of people internally within certain departments. Eventually we figured out the thing they had in common was that they had the Grammarly extension installed. The other key thing was that the bug only appe…

> It turned out it was because of a bad regex in the grammarly extension that caused the page to hang if the domain name was more than about 100 characters. Just today I debugged a regex that would DoS our backend whenever the user enters the wrong thing in a form. Now I'm reading up on regex engines: https://swtch.com/%7Ersc/regexp/regexp1.html

Just in case you haven't seen the postmortem of the Cloudflare outage which also was caused by a regex based DoS: https://blog.cloudflare.com/details-of-the-cloudflare-outage...

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#245

Post by eyelidlessness »

resonious wrote: post #236

I gotta say, the ending was pretty disappointing. I was so hyped to learn why Grammarly crashes when Chrome loads a particular gif. What about the gif was different? What part of Grammarly made that happen? I hate to say it but this is modern web dev in a nutshell. Remove stuff until you find where the bug is, tweak it randomly until it's fixed, done. No root cause analysis or anything deep. This is a great post anyw…

> I hate to say it but this is modern web dev in a nutshell. Remove stuff until you find where the bug is, tweak it randomly until it's fixed, done.

I’ve alternated between frontend, “full stack”, and backend roles for over 20 years. It’s my experience that what you’re describing is “dev in a nutshell”—neither “modern” nor “web” in the sense you seem to mean. And in any case it’s highly situational and variable depending on the dev and their team.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#246

Post by userbinator »

I agree with the others here about the ending being a total letdown.

Unfortunately, with access to neither the Chrome source code nor the Grammarly source code, we can only guess.

Is this what the "open source" movement has created --- developers who are totally lost without source code and refuse to dig deeper? Of course the corporate interests who don't want us to know the truth, because their profit depends on it, would absolutely adore such propaganda...

I still remember a time when a lot of people would disassemble, understand, and patch programs without source --- and many of them weren't even career developers; it was just a way to get software to do what one wanted, and driven by that motivation, one would naturally learn enough to do so.

The article also touches on another point worth mentioning: the amount of complexity in the whole stack is insane. Seeing all the frameworks upon frameworks being name-dropped, I can't help but feel like a lot of this is self-inflicted.

When I removed loader-spinner.gif, the placeholder we display while the menu options load, the page stopped crashing.

Do menu options take long enough to load that they need a loading animation?

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#247

Post by andershaig »

I can't remember the details anymore but the craziest bug I ever found was one that would crash the page whenever Chrome's Developer Tools were opened. I ended up having to use an embedded JS-based dev tool to figure out what was going on (I was a pretty junior developer and didn't have any better ideas at the time).

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#248

Post by deadbabe »

issung wrote: post #149
toddmorey wrote: post #139

Once my college professor was working on her research paper and told me she was struggling get text to stay underlined. Assuming a simple user error, I expected to help her out in 5 minutes. Over three hours later, we discovered that the combo of her specific video card driver version along with her specific printer driver version would keep text from printing out underlined.

How does one discover something that niche in ~3 hours?

[flagged]

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#249

Post by userbinator »

to11mtm wrote: post #181
generationP wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? How does a video card affect printing?

One of the ways to print things (especially on windows) is Via GDI. [0] Basically using the OS's rendering to make a raster that is then sent to the printer. The main thing the printer's driver does in this case is know how to take the bitmap and tell the printer to print the bitmap (i.e. chunking data and/or sliding the right commands into the bitmap stream) Contrast to, say, PostScript which allow for more compact…

More relevant to the bug is the fact that GDI can do its own rendering, or send commands to a driver, usually for GPU hardware acceleration, but the same applies to printers.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#250

Post by randshift »

resonious wrote: post #236

I gotta say, the ending was pretty disappointing. I was so hyped to learn why Grammarly crashes when Chrome loads a particular gif. What about the gif was different? What part of Grammarly made that happen? I hate to say it but this is modern web dev in a nutshell. Remove stuff until you find where the bug is, tweak it randomly until it's fixed, done. No root cause analysis or anything deep. This is a great post anyw…

They never root caused the bug! They know a symptom (Grammarly and this gif cause things to crash) but still no root cause. I was pretty disappointed at the end.
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