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Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor

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Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor

#51

Post by Vinnl »

KolmogorovComp wrote: post #22
mherrmann wrote: post #10

Congratulations! And thank you for the great write-up. I work with the Chromium code base a lot, and it can indeed be daunting. I use Sublime Text, which treats the code as plain text, apart from syntax highlighting. But it's also possible with at least VS Code to get some more intelligence, such as going to the definition or declaration of a function, etc. People who have now become interested in creating their own…

From your post > you will (...) want to change the name of your browser [to] "Browser of Bliss" instead of as "Chromium". You will find that this is already hard to do. The browser name is hard-coded in many places in the millions of lines of Chromium source code. (...) Viasat are offering a (...) fork called Rebel that makes this easier I am surprised that kind of change has not been upstreamed, or is Google activel…

I'd also be surprised if that browser name is "Chromium", given that Google Chrome doesn't brand itself as such. (And vice versa.)

Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor

#52

Post by high_na_euv »

mrweasel wrote: post #15

Not that I really see away around it, given the size and feature set of Chrome, but those build requirements are just crazy. It kinda throws the open source and "everyone can contribute" model out the window, if you can't afford a pretty insane workstation then you're going to have a bad time. I doubt that Firefox is better, I seem to remember that building Firefox and the VIA C3 processor years back as around half a…

Cpp compile times are shame as hell

This shit shouldnt need this many resources for debug builds

Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor

#53

Post by rrr_oh_man »

creesch wrote: post #30
rrr_oh_man wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Certainly with Mozilla the interactions I have had on Bugzilla with various people there as well as in other places simply made me decide to work around the issues. Can you elaborate on your experience?

Sure. I should point out though that I also had many positive individual experiences with people from Mozilla. Interesting conversations and insights in various things. It is just that overall I had a few too many interactions, which would make hesitate trying to invest a lot of time in things like PRs. What it mostly comes down to is that communication several times seemingly seemed a one way street. Where I provide…

Interesting!

My negative experience with Firefox was with this 6 year old feature request relating to container colors. [0] They have hardcoded some colors & icons (6 or 8 I think?) as possible options. The problem is: If you have more than half a dozen of Gmail accounts that you want to containerize (e.g. for client work), it is really hard to keep them apart at first glance. Compare this to Google Chrome, where you can choose the browser color for each associated Gmail account individually.

I tried to manually extend & build it for myself, but the codebase relating to that was just a mindfuck to work on...

    [0] https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/1566
TL;DR: https://xkcd.com/619

Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor

#54

Post by coldpie »

Glacia wrote: post #17

On a similar note, i always wanted to contribute to Firefox, but every time i looked at how to compile it i noped the fuck out of it. It's probably is doable on linux but it's sounds like a nightmare on windows.

> It's probably is doable on linux

Yep. The way you do it on Linux is to grab your distro's package build script and use that. It will specify all of the build- and run-time dependencies (which you use your standard package manager to resolve), and contain whatever commands are required to build it. Usually you just install dependencies and run one command, and you've got a package you can install like any other.

Here, for example, is the script for Arch Linux's Firefox package: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/fi...

Just install the dependencies listed there, run "makepkg", and boom, Firefox pops out the other end. If you're doing active development, you can probably figure out a quicker change/build/test loop, but that'll get you started.

> but it's sounds like a nightmare on windows.

I wouldn't wish the hell of software development on Windows upon my worst enemy :)

Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor

#55

Post by deckar01 »

> one thing that I was completely unsure about was how to add tests for this fix.

Similar to blaming the file for maintainers, the diff of those commits can direct you to their tests. The full patches that those commits belong to can also be useful for finding undocumented habits that have lead to approval.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/30998048

Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor

#56

Post by poincaredisk »

KolmogorovComp wrote: post #47
benreesman wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s just the kind of thing that happens in a huge, production codebase. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of Google, but some strings in multiple places isn’t a good reason to be skeptical of the Chromium maintainers.

I know it's naturally happening in a large codebase, I'm asking why they specifically maintain a fork just for that instead of trying to push what are probably easy (but tedious) upstream fixes.

Purely guessing: abstracting a browser name is yet another abstraction layer. A later that is not needed by chromium. Maintainers of chromium primarily care about maintainability of chromium, not other forks.

Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor

#57

Post by dylan604 »

macintux wrote: post #26
Neywiny wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think subconsciously I look to the end to find differences too. So maybe I'd prefer er/let to come last

When I joined my current team, I was surprised when I realized all of my co-workers were using the end of strings to verify their identity, when I was looking at the beginning of them. It was confusing: I'd be reading off random characters, and they'd be reading them aloud at the same time, and we'd all be saying different things.

I've run into this with GUID/UUID strings. Some apps truncate them while appending an ellipses to the end, so that the last bits of characters are not even visible by default. It's a mixed bag to be sure

Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor

#58

Post by quirino »

There's this one Chrome (?) bug I've been experiencing for a long time on Linux.

Every once in a while, the browser detects I'm typing "±±±±±±+..." and writes that to any selected text input. It stops when I type anything, but sometimes comes back rather quickly.

I thought it was a keyboard issue, but it doesn't affect Firefox or other applications, only Chrome based ones like Spotify and VSCode.

I've found no other mention of this on the internet and I'd love to to hunt this down and fix it but have no clue where to start. I guess the first step would be to consistently reproduce the bug...

If you're interested, I screen recorded it happening once. Mind there's music playing: https://youtu.be/S7OGTULLsqg.

Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor

#59

Post by lxgr »

userbinator wrote: post #48
mrweasel wrote: post #15

Not that I really see away around it, given the size and feature set of Chrome, but those build requirements are just crazy. It kinda throws the open source and "everyone can contribute" model out the window, if you can't afford a pretty insane workstation then you're going to have a bad time. I doubt that Firefox is better, I seem to remember that building Firefox and the VIA C3 processor years back as around half a…

My solution for a few "bugs considered features" in huge open-source software like Firefox was to just patch the binary. Much easier than figuring out how to build it, and with only the change I wanted.

Do you have experience in disassembling binaries? How do you find the relevant part of the executable, and what tools are you using for this?

Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor

#60

Post by bkor »

quirino wrote: post #58

There's this one Chrome (?) bug I've been experiencing for a long time on Linux. Every once in a while, the browser detects I'm typing "±±±±±±+..." and writes that to any selected text input. It stops when I type anything, but sometimes comes back rather quickly. I thought it was a keyboard issue, but it doesn't affect Firefox or other applications, only Chrome based ones like Spotify and VSCode. I've found no other…

> Every once in a while, the browser detects I'm typing "±±±±±±+..."

Interesting bug! Not exactly following on what triggers the bug. Do you have a ± key on your keyboard (some international one)? Or does it occur after e.g. pressing "+", then "-"? Do you use compose keys? Does it do this randomly?

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