Opening http://../foo on Android Chrome crashes the browser (Warning: or worse) • Hacker News Board

Re: Opening http://../foo on Android Chrome crashes the browser (Warning: or worse)

#81

Post by Helmut10001 » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 6:24 AM UTC

mod50ack wrote: post #78

Helmut10001 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off Topic: I don't get it why, after 10 years of mobile browser development, there still is no "close all tabs at end" option. Every time I visit my parents, I have to clean up their 150+ open chrome android tabs because they don't understand how to properly clean up their browsing sessions. Why on earth would I want to open the same old tabs in the morning, that I already looked at the day before?

There are such options on Firefox. Auto close and close on quit, although annoyingly the latter now requires choosing quit from the app menu instead of just closing the app like a few years ago. There is also "close all tabs" if you just hold the tab button, as well as in the ... menu on the tab screen

You are right. My point is that you have to take steps to close tabs, if it is just "explicitly closing Firefox". On Desktop, the browser will be terminated on shutdown. Shutdown does not apply to phones. If I want to close all tabs the second I lock my phone - no such thing. It would be enough having a "Stop all Apps&Tabs at 12am" feature.

This is really why I avoid browsing things on my phone at all, or use self-hosted progressive web apps that run in dedicated tasks.

Btw. - can someone explain why my initial comment is downvoted - Is it because my use case appears ignorant or unusually extravagant?

Re: Opening http://../foo on Android Chrome crashes the browser (Warning: or worse)

#82

Post by Helmut10001 » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 6:35 AM UTC

croes wrote: post #50

Sharlin wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because for a large number of people (including me) tabs are also bookmarks. Granted, most of them I’ll never get back to, but it’s a habit that’s difficult to break.

Yep, because you can't save all open tabs as bookmarks

I think bookmarks on Desktop disappeared for a reason: They are not really useful. On Android, you can save "bookmarks" as symbol-links or install in case of PWAs. These symbols can be organized pretty good using the main Android interface. No need for a dedicated browser feature.

On Desktop, if I want to memorize a blog post etc., I use tools such as ArchiveBox, which also prevents later inaccessibility.

To memorize pages on Desktop, there're better features available that integrate more direcly on the OS level, e.g. similar to Android symbols.. There are also self hosted link organizers with tagging feature etc.

Re: Opening http://../foo on Android Chrome crashes the browser (Warning: or worse)

#83

Post by smichel17 » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 10:56 AM UTC

Sharlin wrote: post #64

croes wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not sarcasm. Because this feature is missing on chrome android I only have the option to close all tabs or to manually open each tab and decide to bookmark it or not.

Ah, sorry. I was thinking of desktop browsers that do have the feature (but I don’t think I’ve ever used it as, well, I hardly use bookmarks).

I disable url bar autocompletion for history, so it's only for bookmarks and open tabs, and use my bookmarks as a way to choose which sites are easy to get to.

Re: Opening http://../foo on Android Chrome crashes the browser (Warning: or worse)

#84

Post by zamadatix » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

junon wrote: post #57

chmod775 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's wrong. You can clear both cache and data of a system app on a typical Android device. You just can't uninstall it. The base .apk is stored on a read-only system partition, so you can't completely get rid of it, but typically you should be able to remove all data of that app, clear its cache, uninstall any updates it downloaded (since those are stored on another partition), and also disable it. I haven't used a…

Nope. Chrome's storage lists "0b" for its storage, which causes XiaoMi's OS to grey out the memory panel for the app. You cannot, for whatever reason, clear the app cache in Chrome's case. However, sure enough, tab instances persist even across killing the app and then force stopping it.

What happens if you disable?

Re: Opening http://../foo on Android Chrome crashes the browser (Warning: or worse)

#85

Post by junon » Sun, Sep 26, 2021, 8:26 AM UTC

chizhik-pyzhik wrote: post #80

Arnavion wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was marked security-sensitive some time within the last 14 hours. It was available to me when the link was submitted here on HN.

can anyone post a mirror? archive.org doesn't seem to support bugs.chromium.org :/

There wasn't anything there to be honest. Nobody had replied to it and it was still status:unconfirmed. The instructions were pretty bare - just visit the afflicted link.

There wasn't any response or activity prior to it being marked as private.

Re: Opening http://../foo on Android Chrome crashes the browser (Warning: or worse)

#86

Post by GuB-42 » Mon, Sep 27, 2021, 11:01 AM UTC

chrismorgan wrote: post #19

junon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize "safe" languages don't protect you from all bugs, right? So tired of this narrative on HN.

But actual crashes are most likely due to memory unsafety; I’d be extremely surprised if the root cause was not found to be in a memory-unsafe language, though I doubt it’ll be in the URL parser.

Memory safe languages also have crashes, often uncaught exceptions, or explicit calls to abort() or similar functions (die, panic, etc...). Infinite recursion, and the resulting stack overflow is another common cause of crash that can happen in any language.

In fact, a crash (segmentation fault) is an exception. In theory, the program could catch it and try to recover from it, it is just that it is a terrible thing to do because you can't be sure of anything from now one.

In fact, letting the program crash is the basis of "offensive programming". This idea opposes the idea of defensive programming, where you try to be prepared for anything and try to do something sensible. In offensive programming, you crash when things are not as expected. For example, if you ask for the 5th element of a 4 element list, in the former, you return some kind of default value, in the latter, you crash with an "out of bounds" exception, or let a watchdog restart the system.

Both approaches have their pros and cons.