Except for the intent, it sounds like an attack.
"The attack is only possible through a carefully crafted browser ..."
Google Chrome experiment crashes browser tabs, impacts companies worldwide
61–70 of 109 posts
Re: Google Chrome experiment crashes browser tabs, impacts companies worldwide
#62I chuckled at this: > "Do you see the impact you created for thousands of us without any warning or explanation? We are not your test subjects," said an angry sysadmin. "We are running professional services for multi million dollar programs. Do you understand how many hours of resources were wasted by your 'experiment'?" Did you, dear sysadmin, pay anything for Google Chrome? No? Are you in any contractual relation t…
So no pay, no voice?
Of course it's not that simple. There are other ways to gain leverage over Google and the Chrome development process than money. But money is the easiest one for enterprises, especially if they boast their multi-million-dollar programs, so there at least seems to be a cashflow of considerable size depending on Chrome, of which a tiny part may possibly be diverted. And for a lot of enterprises that are not exactly at Google-scale, paying for it and hence being able to request support (and maybe even make Google pay for some of the monetary damages, depending on how the contracts are written) is the only feasible option to motivate Google.
However, Chromium being open-source, there is always the possibility of taking matters into your own hand here as an alternative to the above. That doesn't come free of charge as well, of course, the money just ends up somewhere else than Google.
Re: Google Chrome experiment crashes browser tabs, impacts companies worldwide
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
There aren't a lot of alternatives to the current trend of shipping shit fast and furious.
Firefox does: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-esr-release-cyc...
Also relevant is that there are additional management features targeted at Enterprise needs like group policy.
Re: Google Chrome experiment crashes browser tabs, impacts companies worldwide
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> plus useragent-switcher for sites that pretend to care about my "security" What kind of site does that? I'm on ESR too (from Debian's repos) and never seen anything like it
Specifically this example I don't know, but there are pretty big differences between look and feel on websites when sending a Chrome UA vs a Firefox UA. The most obvious example is Google.
I just lie about the version: an ESR can lag current by 8 major versions, ~12 months (with full security patching of course)
Re: Google Chrome experiment crashes browser tabs, impacts companies worldwide
#65I've been dealing with this bug for the last couple of days and it's been hugely frustrating. This was not a new version of Chrome or a software update. None of our software was updated at all (and we spent a long time checking!). But apparently Google have an ability to change a setting and globally affect the behaviour of all Chrome browsers by enabling experimental features. We carefully manage our software update…
As an admin why would you not also run the beta version of the browser in a limited setting? That would have helped you find out about this issue sooner, since the experiment was enabled there for a while.
I'm sure plenty of admins do, that doesn't mean you will test with the same flags chosen in an experiment it only means you will see changes going into stable permanently enabled a bit early.
My own experience with ChromeOs is that I switch to beta, report bugs via interfaces provided (by Google) and then the chromium team acts surprised when the regression hits stable.
If you ignore signals don't ask for them.
Edit- clarity
Re: Google Chrome experiment crashes browser tabs, impacts companies worldwide
#66I chuckled at this: > "Do you see the impact you created for thousands of us without any warning or explanation? We are not your test subjects," said an angry sysadmin. "We are running professional services for multi million dollar programs. Do you understand how many hours of resources were wasted by your 'experiment'?" Did you, dear sysadmin, pay anything for Google Chrome? No? Are you in any contractual relation t…
Google have made many attempts to sell Google services, and Chrome in particular[1], as professional software that businesses can rely on. I've been at conferences where senior Google staff went to great lengths to present the benefits of switching to Chrome. > The experiments are not exactly a secret program and have existed for a while I've been responsible for managing Chrome in a professional environment for seve…
I found this Chromium bug report, which seems to be the epicenter of all the debate and also the source of the citations from the linked article:
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=102483...
It is well worth a read! There are lots of complaints from what seems to be business users of the free version, but also a few by customers of the Chrome Enterprise subscription with managed installations, and they also appear to be affected by this issue and are demanding an option to disable the trials. From that I conclude that it can be considered safe that the trials also affect paying customers, and it does indeed seem as if they also have no option to disable them, at least currently (my personal guess is this is going to change, for sure at least for the paying customers, hopefully for everyone).
Re: Google Chrome experiment crashes browser tabs, impacts companies worldwide
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
ESR user for many years, plus useragent-switcher for sites that pretend to care about my "security" (but mostly care about CSS eye candy and the latest whizzbang). Free beta tester for other people isn't in my job description ;-)
> plus useragent-switcher for sites that pretend to care about my "security" What kind of site does that? I'm on ESR too (from Debian's repos) and never seen anything like it
Citrix support kb is one.
I've heard Twitter & Spotify too.
Re: Google Chrome experiment crashes browser tabs, impacts companies worldwide
#68While Google might have fucked up, what could possibly be your workflow where a single crashed tab costs you one and a half day's of work?
Well it wasn't just one tab. At my company all work is done on the browser (Web app) and the browser would just crash and there was no indication what could be the problem. So although it didn't cost the entirety of one a half days work per user it severely diminished productivity all around.
Re: Google Chrome experiment crashes browser tabs, impacts companies worldwide
#69If something is critical infrastructure for you, better make sure you have a backup. I've seen this in a Swiss government agency that has Firefox installed exactly for this purpose. Their main browser is the built-in one, but if it can't or must not be used (e.g. because of a zero-day threat), they can quickly roll out a change to make Firefox the default browser until the problem/threat is over.
>they can quickly roll out a change to make Firefox the default browser until the problem/threat is over. ...why not just make firefox the default browser full-time?
What if Firefox has a problem?
Re: Google Chrome experiment crashes browser tabs, impacts companies worldwide
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whoa, I just set out to find the way to disable them. I thought it was possible, but I seem to have confused that with Firefox. Firefox calls it "studies", and you can easily opt out of them in the browser's options. Chrome (and chromium) calls the feature "field trials" and there doesn't really seem to be a way to opt out. I'm seriously baffled by the audacity of Google here. Seems as if the only way to actually get…
> I'm seriously baffled by the audacity of Google here Join the club! > It might be worth to investigate whether there is some kind of host name that could be nullified on the network, of the server that the trials are loaded from. It looks like they're downloaded from https://clients4.google.com/chrome-variations/seed Blocking the entire hostname would cause problems with other features of Chrome. But I think blocki…
> But I think blocking the particular URL would need SSL interception which isn't very appealing.
SSL interception is very appealing in a corporate environment. Thanks for sharing this, I've raised it with the guys who run the proxies here to investigate if we can / should drop this.