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Chromium has over 1600 command-line switches

peter.sh

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Re: Chromium has over 1600 command-line switches

#41

Post by DemocracyFTW2 »

ryandrake wrote: post #22

This could be a good thing. Too many applications are overly opinionated, make decisions on behalf of the user (without the ability to override), minimize user choice, don't respect the user's configuration, and in general, do things their way rather than the user's way. More switches is often better.

I've actually made it a design principle that whenever two or more choices seem to present themselves and I have to decide whether to do it the one or the other way, provided it's not too difficult to implement both, I do that and then I have the much lesser burden of deciding on the most reasonable default. This is also the result of decades-long frustrations with app behavior that is artificially restricted

Re: Chromium has over 1600 command-line switches

#42

Post by Lockal »

ysabri wrote: post #33
nikisweeting wrote: post #21

I've tested 300+ of them for the purpose of reducing browser fingerprintability while building ArchiveBox's puppeteer support. It was quite a journey! Lots of subtle GPU rendering stuff that can easily give away a headless browser, or that differs between OS's in ways that can be used to detect when a browser doesn't match the expected behavior for the OS it reports to be running on. Some of my favorite lesser-known…

I wonder if there is a reference behind '--ash-no-nudges', I tried looking but found nothing.

ash is common abbreviation from "Aura shell"; read it like Gtk/Qt. Nudges is also a common term recently - see https://medium.com/@helloannapo/behavioural-design-basics-co...

Re: Chromium has over 1600 command-line switches

#44

Post by mike_hearn »

jeffbee wrote: post #9

We're talking about the company that had to contribute arbitrary-length command lines to the Linux kernel, and whose flags library supports reading the flags from a file, in case your appetite for flags is insatiable. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/b6a2fea39318e43fee8...

Lots of flag libraries support @argfiles, it's useful for Windows amongst other places.

The real fun story about Google and flags is from the days when their flags library supported flags being passed in gzipped base64 form ... via a flag. I think the reason was there was a server that could take the whole configuration in the form of a flag, but it had got too large for Linux at some point and they didn't want to load the config from a file because there was better support for canaried/partial rollouts of flag changes than data file changes. Or something like that.

Re: Chromium has over 1600 command-line switches

#46

Post by ycombinatrix »

raihansaputra wrote: post #40
ysabri wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also found this extension to be useful and more configurable: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/allow-cors-access-c...

do you or anyone else happen to know an extension that allows getUserMedia to work without https? i just need a photo from a webcam (a la that opens a camera on a smartphone) for a local network webapp. configuring https just for this is fickle.

it should work over http in the special case of localhost. try port forwarding localhost:80 to the webapp.

Re: Chromium has over 1600 command-line switches

#47

Post by mcrute »

hu3 wrote: post #4

I wonder if services like Gmail have hundreds of feature flags at any given point.

Yes, everything internally has many flags (hundreds or thousands), so much so that they raise the command line size limit (ARG_MAX) in the kernel. I think it was around 2GB when I left. The internal frameworks really encourage using flags too, there's a @Flag decorator for Java that's sprinkled all over the code and sometimes nested extremely deeply down chains of classes that promote this behavior (abseil, (https://abseil.io/docs/cpp/guides/flags) has macros for this too).
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