Google Sync Clobbers Chrome Browsers 102
If you use Chrome along with Google's Sync, you may have noticed something strange Monday: normally stable Chrome crashing. An article at Wired (excerpt below) explains why: "Late Monday, Google engineer Tim Steele confirmed what developers had been suspecting. The crashes were affecting Chrome users who were using another Google web service known as Sync, and that Sync and other Google services — presumably Gmail too — were clobbered Monday when Google misconfigured its load-balancing servers. ... Steele wrote in a developer discussion forum, a problem with Google's Sync servers kicked off an error on the browser, which made Chrome abruptly shut down on the desktop. 'It's due to a backend service that sync servers depend on becoming overwhelmed, and sync servers responding to that by telling all clients to throttle all data types,' Steele said. That 'throttling' messed up things in the browser, causing it to crash."
Sync was sunk (Score:5, Funny)
By a bristly punk.
Having less facial drag,
He'd've more clearly thunk.
Burma Shave
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I like big butts and I can not lie You other brothers can't deny
Denied. They do have a high comedic value, though.
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Top that? Son, I'm gonna obliterate it. (Score:2, Funny)
All right - stop what you're doin' 'cause I'm about to ruin
the image and the style that you're used to.
I look funny, but yo, I'm makin' money see -
so yo world, I hope you're ready for me!
Now gather round, I'm the new fool in town
and my sound's laid down by the Underground.
I drink up all the Hennessey ya got on ya shelf
so just let me introduce myself
My name is Humpty, pronounced with a Umpty.
Yo ladies, oh how I like to hump thee.
And all the rappers in the top ten--please allow me to bump thee.
I'm steppin' ta
Re:Top that? Son, I'm gonna obliterate it. (Score:4, Funny)
I am... Humbled...
Why I will never use the "cloud" exclusively (Score:5, Informative)
Fine as *one* backup location, fine for non-critical data and apps, fine for anything that won't be particularly missed if it goes offline for a while.
Shit for anything important.
Re:Why I will never use the "cloud" exclusively (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the most important piece of the summary is not that the googly cloudy system failed (clouds fail, reality different than spin, is it still news?).
It is that it may be possible to crash chrome from remote, proof of concept exploits may follow soon.
Re:Why I will never use the "cloud" exclusively (Score:4, Informative)
It is that it may be possible to crash chrome from remote, proof of concept exploits may follow soon.
1) Getting it to crash doesn't mean you can actually exploit it. There are boatloads of crashes that you can't exploit
2) The only way you could crash it in this manner in the first place would be to re-target the sync endpoint to get Chrome to connect to a different remote server for syncing, which would be a huge security vulnerability in the first place.
Throttle ? (Score:2)
Why not request bandwidth and only proceed when it is granted.
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I guarantee you that cloud services have far far far far better average reliability than non-cloud ones.
Same as load-balanced server farms, which are basically what clouds are.
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I miss Firefox in this regard (Score:1)
Re:I miss Firefox in this regard (Score:5, Informative)
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It has everything to do with Sync but I guess you didn't read the material. I use Chrome all the time and experienced no problems whatsoever. Why? I don't use Sync.
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Chrome doesn't have bookmark sync, it has a fairly deep browser state sync which happens to also include bookmarks.
Which, if all you want is bookmark sync, is a fairly great way to do it. That's not the focus of Chrome's browser sync, so its not surprising that Chrome's sync isn't optimized for that use case.
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Firefox doesn't have only bookmark sync, it can sync settings, bookmarks, add-ons, passwords, history and tabs
The real advantage of Firefox sync is that is encrypted on the client side, so Mozilla is unable to read your data, not the same with Chrome
Re:I miss Firefox in this regard (Score:5, Informative)
The real advantage of Firefox sync is that is encrypted on the client side, so Mozilla is unable to read your data, not the same with Chrome
That's what I thought too, but apparently Chrome can do that too - it's just not on by default. Go to Settings > Advanced sync settings > Encrypt all synced data.
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I like firefox though. They tell you you are SOL without the passkey. I have no idea how Chrome encrypts. It looks like it is linked to your google account. Google could easily be holding all the keys.
Chrome uses a passphrase to encrypt sync data. By default it will use your Google account password, but you can change it to use any passphrase. If the Chrome devs are doing it right, they should be running the passphrase through PBKDF2 to derive an AES symmetric key. It's worth noting, though, that the Dashboard [google.com] for "Chrome sync" shows counts for the number of synced items of each type. Assuming they're doing the crypto correctly, I see only two ways the Dashboard could know those numbers: (a) if Chome
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The real advantage of Firefox sync is that is encrypted on the client side, so Mozilla is unable to read your data, not the same with Chrome
That's what I thought too, but apparently Chrome can do that too - it's just not on by default. Go to Settings > Advanced sync settings > Encrypt all synced data.
The problem is, though, that default is the reality for the vast majority of users.
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The reality is, that most users don't really care if someone sees their bookmarks. It's only a problem for privacy-obsessed nerds who project their mania onto other people.
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And for anyone who has gotten burned by someone seeing the wrong bookmark/history entry. The difference with privacy-obsessed nerds is
1) They see the problem before it actually happens to them and
2) They have nobody to actually object to their viewing horse porn.
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And that's cool - there's the option to turn it on for thems that wants it. Where it crosses the line is where they insist (like the GP) that having the option isn't enough, and that paranoia must be the default.
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Chrome always encrypts your passwords on the client side - the other stuff isn't encrypted by default but can be encrypted as well if you choose to.
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Great, I have old information of the first Chrome sync implementation. I will try it on my Chrome instances (my secondary browser)
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The best part about firefox sync is it always resulted in duplicates duplicates so even if you "lost" one set of bookmarks bookmarks then you'd have the other copy copy right there. That's why I stopped using firefox sync. xmarks on FF actually worked flawlessly, but FF wanted to put them out of business by shipping something built in that claimed to do the same thing for free but actually didn't work at all. Then I switched to chrome and never looked back. GOOG can F up quite a few more times until the
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Shocking! (Score:1)
Chrome + Windows = Firefox (Score:3)
Re:Firefox + Windows = Opera (Score:5, Funny)
$ tr "Firefox Opera" "Opera Midori" < parentcomment
That gives:
Itisrrmsithririiiris mrispgnpapcintioi blrmsiwpthiOpira Mi niWpnd wsithitig ibry ndiWpnd ws'istindiidibiipnidimigr.iThrioi blrmsiI'vriiunipnt ihivribrrninumri usirn ughithitiI'vrihidit idi oiOpira Mi nimyiWpnd wsimichpnriindig it idorii.iEvriy nripsiaimplpiiiwpthithriusuilidpskio undpngithitiWpnd wsic nspdrisim iripmo itintithinisrivpcpngiusriirvrntsisuchiisim usriclpcks,irtc.iH wrvri,ipnithricisri aiOpira Miptisrrmsivriyimuchiw isr.idoriii--in ioi blrm.i(Yrs,iillithriusuilisusorctsisuchiisirMtrnsp ns,iolugpns,imilwiir/vpiusiscinsirtc.ihivribrrnidriltiwpth.)
I'm not sure what this is intended to tell me, though.
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I think you just offered yourself to Cthulu for sexual favors.
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Cool but that landed you offtopic.
Try with: whatever + windows = linux or OSX
Firefox much improved (Score:2)
Firefox is no longer the bloated piece of crap it once was while Chrome was new. It uses the least amount of ram of any browser. It no longer requires 4 gigs of ram and a quad core like version 4. Plugins no longer break with the latest release either between versions. Chrome has gotten buggy and much slower in comparison. In 2011 Chrome would the only browser besides old IE that could run on 5 year old hardware. Now firefox runs as fast as 2.0 on these systems.
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Firefox is no longer the bloated piece of crap it once was
Yeah, every time a new version of Firefox comes out (what is it - every 8 hours or so?) we hear how the NEW version is all shiny and efficient, unlike those bloated OLD versions.
The cycle's been going on for several years now. I'm sure we'll eventually be hearing how Firefox 129 isn't bloated, unlike that gosh-awful memory hog Firefox 128.
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There are many old machines out there.
Look at the popularity of XP? Something insane like 300,000,000 still are using it today! with these machines that probably only have 512- 1 gb of ram ram usage is performance. XP swaps like a mofo too so less hard drive thrashing by less memory usage will help on such ancient platforms.
On mine and probably your machine yeah we have 8 gigs so who the fuck cares. But on these the companies and users see no reason to upgrade and Firefox 3.6 and 4 were getting near unusabl
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Go use it rather than hold on to your beliefs? Go under help about FF and update and give it a try for 10 minutes and tell me if it is now much better?
I submitted a story last july with Firefox 13 gets benchmarked here. You can do a search and look it up? I wouldn't touch before last summer but if you have Chrome Firefox is certainly an alternative again. It is prone to bad releases every now and then. Also the quality of the code is up now too so the old update jokes are invalid.
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No, what's going on here is ridiculous software engineering.
The mobile browser was affected also. (Score:2)
I can tell you this for certain first hand. I was wondering if there was something wrong with my phone itself, had it not been a busy day there's a serious chance I would have devoted some time finding a better ROM even though Mean ROM has been been pretty good so far, other than annoyances with the Android browser - which is why I put mobile Chrome on despite them being so similar.
Yesterday? (Score:2)
This is still happening today.
This explains it. (Score:2, Funny)
Here I thought it was crashing because I installed a plugin to make it more like Firefox.
Significant resource issues lately (Score:2)
I've noticed lately my Windows 7 x64 machine has been having issues with a fraction of my normal "Tab load" on Chrome, crashing or freezing pages, unable to show YouTube pages properly, etc... I believe this might be related to the Sync problem, since I use that.
These problems started a few weeks ago.
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And Yet (Score:5, Informative)
No one is talking about slashdot being down last night.
Re: And Yet (Score:2)
It was mentioned in another thread today and was modded 'off topic' which to be fair it was. /. Wasn't 'down' though. Th front page was visible, the ads were loading, but, all clicks were ignored except the log in window which you could fill in then a 503 error this morning around 8.30 uk time. /. Was up, but unresponsive. Just like me at 8.30 in the morning in the office
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baloney. couldn't get anything. sourceforge, slashdot and freecode all down etc were down. front page was not visible
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baloney. couldn't get anything. sourceforge, slashdot and freecode all down etc were down. front page was not visible
Turn on your computer next time.
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It was mentioned in another thread today and was modded 'off topic' which to be fair it was. /. Wasn't 'down' though. Th front page was visible, the ads were loading, but, all clicks were ignored except the log in window which you could fill in then a 503 error this morning around 8.30 uk time. /. Was up, but unresponsive. Just like me at 8.30 in the morning in the office
Actually the clicks weren't ignored, as the URL bar showed. It's just that the complete URL was ignored, and Slashdot just showed the front page for any and every URL.
Re: And Yet (Score:3)
You're right and my mistake. The URL showed correctly, but the page didn't load.
The front page was definitely visible at around 8.30am UK. How else was i able to attempt to log in and get a 503?
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Slashdot being down doesn't cause my browser to crash.
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Slashdot being down made me significantly more productive.
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Yeah, what happened? I noticed new stories were still posted and its uptime did not get reset.
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Dice was doing some DB server maintenance. They also took down Sourceforge for the same reason (since it shares some of the hardware).
DONT use the default bookmarks sync function (Score:1)
"Normally stable Chrome"? (Score:1)
Not in my experience. It crashes daily on me, often more than once a day. And the pseudo-Macintosh sad face "Aw snap..." message wasn't cute the first time. Now it's beyond irritating. Don't hearken back to a 20 year old theme in a vain attempt to try to be cute when you've imploded; at the very least give me some kind of error message. (I suppose that's verboten in the Google "less is more" universe, which is why you also strip down the browser interface so much that not only are semi-relevant buttons and
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It sounds to me like you might have a corrupt profile? I've never had any of these issues with Chrome (on Linux) and I've been using it since the very first Chromium releases. Switched to the official Google version of Chrome a few years ago when it was released. It's pretty stable for me, but this bug did cause my profile to become corrupted and it would basically crash on startup. I just restored from my weekend system backup and everything was fine again.
Crash during boot (Score:2)
I'm more surprised that every time I BOOTED Windows there was a Google Chrome crash message box presented. I can assure you that I was never given an option about having Chrome start with Windows and I most definitely did NOT added Chrome to any of my start up stuff. So in addition to showing that actual humans work at Google (well, at least a few) this also exposed the fact that installing Chrome installs something (that may claim to BE Chrome) that normally runs silently every time Windows is started.
Line by line debugging reveals... (Score:5, Funny)
//{
tabs.sync();
//}
//catch
//{
//printf("Oops, cloud sync failed. Terribly sorry, Captain. We'll fail gracefully and just make do without.");
//}
// James, I fucking told you not to use try-catch statements, they're too slow. The code works and a cloud failure is basically impossible (five nines, baby) so just chill, will you?
// P.S.
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Ha! I think I worke with that guy. I love the C guys stuck in the 80s, who think exceptions are somehow slower than checking a return code and conditionally branching manually at every layer in the stack, and even better the guys who just never check for errors - faster that way.
At least Chrome is hitting an assertion and not a crash.
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The null hypothesis is that fancy tech would have an overhead. If you're going to claim it doesn't, then you need to provide the independent studies verifying that claim.
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C++ error checking was horribly slow when the feature was first added to compilers (late 80's, or early 90's, depending on the compiler), but that got fixed soon thereafter.
Basically, a catch block pushes a marker on the stack, which is pretty fast. On a throw, the compiler looks for that marker on each stack frame it unwinds, which is not free but still pretty fast - and since it's completely under the compiler's control, it's quite well optimized these days.
So, it's stil slower than not doing error check
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I'm confused... (Score:2)
So for one day Internet Explorer was actually superior to Chrome?
normally stable? (Score:2)
IE (Score:2)