Google Chrome is Freezing Intermittently With the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, Users Say (neowin.net) 183
Several users who have updated their computers to Windows 10 April 2018 Update are reporting that Chrome is freezing their machines. From a report: I have now used the April 2018 Update for nearly 24 hours and the same problem has presented itself no less than five times. For a machine - which was working perfectly prior to the update - with a Core i7 CPU, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD, I naturally resorted to Reddit and Microsoft forum threads to see if others were experiencing the issue. It appears that several users on Reddit (spotted by Softpedia) with machines sporting varying configurations are experiencing the problem as well, and the only fix to it is the one I found too; that is, putting the laptop to sleep using the power button or closing the lid.
Yup! (Score:2)
And I checked the resource usage, one tab was using 2 gigs of RAM for some reason! ACK!
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And I checked the resource usage, one tab was using 2 gigs of RAM for some reason! ACK!
Isn't that normal for Chrome though? It is a resource hog.
Re:Yup! (Score:5, Funny)
And I checked the resource usage, one tab was using 2 gigs of RAM for some reason! ACK!
So you're saying you’re not seeing anything out of the ordinary?
Re:Yup! (Score:5, Interesting)
People let their browser open longer and longer on the same page, opening more pages...
And many web sites (Facebook to begin with) allocate objects, create circular references and don't break the reference cycle because "dropping" the object, leading to a cycle of objects (elements, functions and closures) which can't be freed by the garbage collect.
Don't blame the browser, blame the web sites creator who don't care about cleaning their junk.
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Don't blame the browser, blame the web sites creator who don't care about cleaning their junk.
This is only valid if all browsers are experiencing this kind of memory issue. If there's a fix that some browsers refuse to implement, that's on them as well.
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On my Windows 10, a freshly open Google Chrome with a single tab open on Gmail uses half a gig of memory. Yes, there are situations where it's not really Google's fault, but Google is certainly no longer engineering with resource conservation in mind (there are video editing software that can get by on not much more than half a gig of memory!).
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Don't blame the browser, blame the web sites creator who don't care about cleaning their junk.
I don't want to know if the site creator cleans his junk or not. That's a problem for his significant other.
I resemble that remark! (Score:2)
creator who don't care about cleaning their junk.
Now don't you dare bring their personal hygiene into THIS discussion!
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Allowing the stability of YOUR system to be dependent on remote hosts coding correctly is folly. Even if most sites comply, some won't. A fraction of those may even be malicious. Browsers need to be able to detect when something is going off the rails and kill a thread -- or at least suspend it and ask the user -- because expecting not to encounter intentional abuse is tantamount to wearing a big "pwn me" sign.
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And I checked the resource usage, one tab was using 2 gigs of RAM for some reason! ACK!
So you're saying you’re not seeing anything out of the ordinary?
No. The GP is saying that there is a marked improvement in memory usage.
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Sounds like Microsoft and Google's telemetry collided and is causing chaos everywhere. The two threads are arguing about who gets to take what.
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RAM is there to be used, not bragged about.
Re: Yup! (Score:4, Insightful)
Whe you only have to budget for one PC with 16GB of RAM, it may not seem like a lot. When you have to budget for hundreds or even thousands of PCs, against a Walmart razor thin margin ecosystem, 16GB is an incredible expense. And one can't raise margins to cover the cost of a better rig, because the lowest bidder wins. This trickles down to the employee who can't afford more than $400 per cycle for a PC, and whose 4GB/dual core box isn't past the 8 year cycle yet.
Excessive memory usage by websites and browsers, and excessive bandwidth usage by websites is both greed and gluttony, and is disrespectful to the working class. Its like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, except in this case that pot of gold is affordable computing. By the time we get 10mbps 4G LTE across the country, the web is going to require 100mbps minimum. Afford 16 GB of RAM, and the minimum is now 64GB.
That's the least of it (Score:4)
I switched away from Firefox recently for various reasons and Chrome has been a sore disappointment. Tabs crash constantly, GIFS stop working (shows first frame then goes black), the addon ecosystem is worse than Firefox - there's more of them, just poorly made and option poor.
There's not a single browser on the market today that I would actively recommend. Just an array of mediocrity.
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Tabs crash constantly, GIFS stop working
That second one sounds more like a feature, not a bug.
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It's a known, rare Chrome bug with certain Intel HD drivers. The only "easy" way to fix it is to disable/renable the driver. Probably related to hardware acceleration and gifv
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--Have you tried Palemoon? It's like Firefox before Australis. Plugins are available as well, and it has a Linux and Mac version.
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Palemoon/Watermoon are great but now that they've diverged from the main FF line they're most likely to become security problems or be forced to make the same switch to "Quantum". A temporary solution at best
Re:That's the least of it (Score:5, Insightful)
we're forced to run 'modern' browsers at work, and even on linux and win10, chromium (I won't run chrome, no matter what) freezes at least once a day. usually its the fucking ADS that cause chromium to lock up, but it sure does lock up solid, almost every single day.
my ancient firefox (which does have security issues; it dates at least 3 years ago) works fine, though. I have all my plugins working from years ago, my adblockers, js blocker, etc. I don't get junk with that setup and it stops the 'toxic web' (I should register that phrase, btw) with all the configured filters. I can't configure enough filters on chromium to make browsing safe again.
yeah, the web is horribly ruined, 'webmasters' are the lowest of our programming brothers (phone app makers are tied for being sleaziest, though) and we need good filtering to make the web usable with all the corruption and BS out there.
its funny how people sing the praises of chrome but for me, its a really bad browser.
Re:That's the least of it (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree that the web is 'ruined'. I blame Marketing departments everywhere. I've been a web programmer for a loooong time, and for a long time we were winning the fight of, "No, you can't put huge pictures everywhere! No, the content can't be all videos! No, we can't have ads in 6 places on the website!"
But then Marketing comes in and shows how much more 'engagement' we can get- etc. etc. and the actual user experience goes into the toilet.
Now the marketing people (literally usually college grads on their first job) have been raised with the shit-hole the web has become, and it is normal. No qualms about shoving 3 or 4 more pieces of crap on the webpage.
Now it is better to trick people into signing up for content "give us your email address in order to read the article" than it is to provide good content. Because then they can say they have reached 10,000 new people this month- who will never, ever open, or even see, the emails that come in.
I hate those people.
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Now the marketing people (literally usually college grads on their first job) have been raised with the shit-hole the web has become, and it is normal. No qualms about shoving 3 or 4 more pieces of crap on the webpage.
Now? I think you're completely forgetting MySpace and Geocities.
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I would also add animated gifs to "Things that suck about the Web"
(Gee, thanks for sucking up 5+ MB of bandwidth. There is a reason we have a dedicated MOVIE format such as .mp4.)
> Now it is better to trick people into signing up for content "give us your email address
I noticed that everyone is going heavy into tracking. Recently I received an email from InVision talking about Walmart's redesigned website.
Now instead of a _simple_ URL:
They link to some crap like this:
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we're forced to run 'modern' browsers at work
Ha suckit! I run IE9 at my work.
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The massive, aggressive shift away from documents to full-blown "apps" is why I quite web development entirely.
I remember when everyone was screaming about standards compliance and usability when MS was in charge. Then Chrome took over and NOW everyone is perfectly okay with pretty and shiny and developing for name-brand browsers only.
Re: That's the least of it (Score:2)
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Chain of Crash [Re:That's the least of it] (Score:2)
At least we have backup choices. If Chrome crashes, we have Edge. If Edge crashes, we have FireFox. If FireFox crashes, we have PaleMoon. If PaleMoon crashes, we have Lynx. If Lynx crashes, we have Emacs. (Emacs has a browser, doesn't it? It has everything else.)
Extra points if you rework "Dem Bones" song for this.
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Surprised that no one has mentioned Brave [brave.com]. Fast, functional, and built-in ad and tracker blocking.
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If Lynx crashes, we have Emacs. (Emacs has a browser, doesn't it? It has everything else.)
Extra points if you rework "Dem Bones" song for this.
Of course, Emacs has browsers.
It has had text browsers for more than a decade... and for the last few years, one has been able to watch YouTube, if one wishes.
To be honest, I only browse text heavy sites in Emacs, like Slashdot, Wkipedia, Oracle's Java specs, MSDN, etc. but for those, I actually strongly recommend it. You were joking with 'If Lynx crashes', but if you weren't I'd still recommend Emacs's EWW before Lynx. Easy to search, fully programmable, and intimately familiar, if you have been using Em
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I was thinking more of this part:
Example:
If Chrome crashes I use Edge then
If Edge crashes I use FireFox then
If Firefox crashes I use BlueMoon then...
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I've really been quite happy with Edge. It still remains far better than Chrome while on battery. I use a VPN for ad blocking, and only need lastpass and evernote extensions. Maybe that's not enough for some, but it's fine for me.
I still have to use Chrome for work as a number of applications don't work with Edge (box.com is a big one), but on my personal surface - Edge is far superior.
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When you start having a problem with all your software, maybe it's time to start looking at the platform on which its running.
Shit last time I saw a Chrome tab crash was back when flash was still a thing, and the tab was only brought down by the flash plugin. Firefox is equally stable these days, though it got hairy for a while.
By the way I'm not sure what you're talking about "ecosystems" for. It's a fucking browser. Throw in an add blocker, and browse the web. If you want an OS then browse the web using e
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The platform on which it's running had no crash problems in Firefox. Firefox was actually remarkably stable & fast - it just suffers from "designer" syndrome. The users needs are put last while the designers do whatever the fuck the trend is this week.
As to ecosystems - there was an entire suite of web development tools I used which was obliterated and only a fraction of the functionality was replaced by a Mozilla version. IRC, SSH, FTP, SQLite, etc were all great extensions that were wiped out by FF
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Re:That's the least of it (Score:5, Funny)
First, I hate Chrome...and the 'new web' with never ending pages. I am not a genius, but when I've been on Reddit for 30 minutes on a never ending page, I think "God, how much RAM is this thing sucking up right now?"
Obviously that is not really Chrome's fault...but the two go hand in hand. The same B-holes that love never ending pages, have a hard-on for Chrome.
As an aside, the new Reddit update has some problems with my account, and I can't load anything anymore. Good riddance.
Second, not sure what you meant regarding your last comment about Microsoft's best interests- But if I owned Microsoft, I would be pretty happy to screw up Google's crap. Google's actions regarding Windows Phone were pitiful. If you think Google gives one crap about users in the world, you're wrong. They were more than happy to break every attempt to get YouTube on Windows Phone- suing Microsoft for an app that was just a web wrapper...
I think Microsoft should just keep breaking Chrome. Google deserves a kick in their testes.
Re: Opera is pretty good (Score:2)
I am pretty satisfied with Opera on Android. It is the only browser on Android that I know of that you can force zoom to be enabled and it rewraps the resized text to be justified to your screen size. That is a very powerful feature.
I'd bet dollars to doughnuts.... (Score:3)
Re:I'd bet dollars to doughnuts.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Function A creates an element B and associate a function C to the "onclick" property of B before linking B to the DOM tree
C being created inside A, it inherits the closure of A in which you find a variable pointing to B
We have DOM -> B -> C -> closure -> B cycle created
When B is removed from DOM, the references loop still stays, every object keeps at least one reference to it and can't be freed by the garbage collect.
Propre way to do it is to clear the onclick of B when you remove it from the DOM to break the cycle... but most web sites don't care and this leads to browsers memory usage growing and growing.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Sounds like a simple solution then.
Extend that too easy to use ".remove()" jQuery method to remove event handlers too.
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Nah. jQuery is fine. It's all the HTML5 ads and third-party tools embedded into the page that cause problems.
You have 200+ requests to load a page from 100 different servers, which means 100 different DNS requests and TCP/IP connections to establish. All of that drags down 5MB of HTML, CSS, and Javascript and takes 60+ seconds to load over broadband. Half of those bits are in some RequireJS, React, Angular, or similar crappy framework that should not exist. Also, half of the ads and third-party garbage
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Exactly!
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No, not jQuery.
Blame the newfangled Single Page App (SPA) frameworks like Angular - that's where this nonsense comes from.
Most SPA sites don't even use jQuery anymore. So you're going to have to target your anger towards something newer.
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That's not how garbage collection works. Look up "mark and sweep" to see what I mean. Garbage collectors (at least decent ones) are designed to collect cycles so long as none of the nodes are "strongly reachable" (borrowing a phrase from Java... not sure if the same terminology applies to the browser).
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Propre way to do it is to clear the onclick of B when you remove it from the DOM
The proper way is to not have so many subs in the employ of one dom to begin with. They can't all be getting the attention they deserve. Get more doms, split them up and put them in separate rooms. It's an adult entertainment venue not a slave house.
Re: I'd bet dollars to doughnuts.... (Score:1)
Topping sucks. It's a hell of a lot of work. The subs just want to lie there like babies and have things happen to them.
So, logic? (Score:1)
Windows changes and not chrome, and suddenly Chrome freezes Windows? All the faulty logic aside, it's a pretty good showcase of how shitty an OS is when an application manages to crash it. Get Windows, and prepare to party like in 1993.
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I've been experiencing the same thing on Mint Linux. Runs for a while and then full lockup. So it's not just Windows.
Re: So, logic? (Score:1)
Chrome isn't crashing Windows. Chrome is crashing and Windows is sweeping the wreckage out of memory like it should.
Has Google been hiring Windows developers from Apple?
Nothing to see here (Score:5, Funny)
This would be the first time a microsoft update has caused problems for a rival's products or programs.
Because this would be the first ever recorded such instances I deem it to be highly unlikely.
...so nothing to see here.
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:4, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code [wikipedia.org]
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Program used to work fine, Microsoft updates OS, program suddenly crashes?
How is that the program developers' fault?
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, if this was Apple instead of Microsoft, the answer would be, "Yeah, and? We updated the OS. It's not our fault if you can't keep up." They do it all the time, the most recent one being the whole DisplayLink fiasco.
Microsoft, however, goes out of it's way to maintain backward compatibility. To the point that they will even recreate bugs in older versions of the OS that applications happen (rightly or wrongly) to depend on. So when something like this happens, it's reasonable for eyebrows to be raised.
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Ah, I understand now. Thank you.
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isn't it the job of the OS to make sure that an individual program can't freeze the whole system ?
Graphics Driver (Score:2)
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I'll add to this. One of the two updates last year had a major incompatibility with AMD drivers. AMD acknowledged this problem being with their drivers themselves. What did they do? Literally took SIX MONTHS to fix the issue. Major games such as Overwatch would randomly crash mid-game within 1-10 minutes of game play (great for a game that literally penalizes you for leaving mid-game). The AMD driver bug also caused issues with Discord, such as massive load times for the app and instabilities with the app.
Windows updating too fast to be stable (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Windows updating too fast to be stable (Score:5, Insightful)
The quality of testing has increased dramatically since Aperture made employee testing mandatory.
Re:Windows updating too fast to be stable (Score:4, Insightful)
The agile development process doesn't belong in an OS. Alas, at this point a change in direction for Windows seems very unlikely so it will have to be use something else or put up with this stupidity
Re: Windows updating too fast to be stable (Score:1)
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No one can be a power user running Windows XP. Come on, get a grip.
Re: Windows updating too fast to be stable (Score:1)
Actually, there are FPGA design suites that have not, and probably never will, be upgraded tonrun on Windows 10. Not the latest dev tools, but those for some of the older gate arrays.
I would dare any dink keyboard jockey or 'web programmer' running Redmond's-greatest to claim that a developer who slings Verilog or VHDL is not a power user.
Re: Windows updating too fast to be stable (Score:2)
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Nine year olds can figure out how to set up a static IP on their computer by watching a half hour of youtube videos.
It takes considerably more effort to learn to be an FPGA developer. In fact, to actually use the power of a computer, without just using it for entertainment, is an elusive goal.
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This is why enterprises and power users are staying with LTSB
So to be clear you're saying this is why enterprises are using the system built specifically for enterprises? And that this bug in software not intended for enterprises and interacting with software on a rolling release that shouldn't be used by enterprises is somehow supposed to be alarming to MS?
Can we get a +5 "Well Duh" mod please?
Also you don't need to be on LTSB. Switch to the semi-annual release instead of the targeted one like a normal person, all this shit is sorted out before it gets rolled out to
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Spy machine glitch (Score:1)
Reminds me of when various things hint towards spy activity..... Windows used to only support 1 program reading a webcam but that was too easily foiling spyware. So they patched it so that any number of programs can open the camera, so now you can't "be sure" when you do it yourself. I never heard anyone asking for that "feature" either.
Now I'm far more suspicious that this is something similar. When an OS patch borks a browser, it reeks of some kind of underhanded spy behavior. Such as hot-patching memory
chrome only has 1 use (Score:1)
On a raspberry pi firefox doesn't seem to do audio hardware acceleration right so anything you are watching streaming like youtube or movie/tv sites you just get a loud static noise. Chrome however handles audio hardware acceleration beautifully and it is a ton of fun watching shows at 720p on such a tiny little 35$ machine.
Aside from this singular use case though, it is piss poor with having options to automatically remove your history upon exit (something baked into firefox). Everything requires some ki
Not only Chrome (Score:5, Informative)
I install the new update yesterday, make the mandatory 5 reboots. This morning, the window's login screen was freezing for a good 5 minutes...
Then when I finally get there, windows ask me to change my login credential... and freeze... then updating language module and freeze.. adding I don't know how many new keyboard in the keyboard bar....
When, we compare this to mature OS like Ubuntu or Mint... Windows take like 3 hours to update on my i5 12g ram 10krpm computer after the download... without counting the reboots... Ubuntu ou Mint can date like 15 minutes on the same hardware..
Windows is not ready for business ... ;-)
Re:Not only Chrome (Score:4, Insightful)
Welcome to 2018. This is how we test software now.
Why bother testing all the popular bits of software on numerous hardware configurations when you can just do a gradual roll out and wait for users to do your QA for you? Rather than employ people to find bugs, just load the OS up with telemetry.
Everyone does it. Android and iOS app updates are rolled out slowly, and you can cancel the roll out via the dashboard if you notice abnormally high numbers of crashes.
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Software testing as a role or individuals responsibility mostly died out in ~2015 in Microsoft (https://testastic.wordpress.com/2015/01/03/in-pursuit-of-quality-shifting-the-program-manager-mindset/ ). Most of those who remained moved into data scientist roles, which is just what you said. The rest of the testing has move towards automation since developers want to develop code, not do manual tests.
Considering that MS has basically said Windows Azure now a days, is it shocking that the development teams
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Yep, QA isn't important these days. Companies got cheap. :(
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Windows is not ready for business ... ;-)
To be fair to Windows if your business is using the new update then it is doing so against MS's own recommendation and doesn't deserve to be called a business as much as a zoo, because only an actual monkey would be running the targeted release branch instead of staying on the semi-annual channel.
Why do you voluntarily beta test in a business setting?
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Well i do not disagree with your thesis (windows 10 sucks), you do have a rotational hard drive. I ran 15k hard drives but dropped them almost a decade ago for a crucial m4 that performed circles around it.
Get a samsung drive. They dont fail. Ive deployed hundreds at this point and just had my first failure on a drive a deployed in 2013. And even that I am not sure if its the actual hard drive that has failed because its working fine for me on the
Windows ain't done till Chrome don't run (Score:4, Funny)
People still use Chrome? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, flamebait subject. But hear me out... given the growing interest in data privacy and concern about the mining of our online activities, Chrome's horrendous tendency to take over all your computers' RAM and CPU, the latest Firefox being measurably faster than Chrome, aggressive and intrusive bundling of trojan Chrome installs into unrelated apps, and now Chrome pulling an IE in pushing proprietary markup that encourages the making of websites that ONLY work in Chrome, why are people still giving Google a pass and using an inferior/arrogant browser when there is a better option?
Re: People still use Chrome? (Score:2)
People still use Chrome?
Generally not the smart ones, no... however, my myriad detractors will no doubt take great pleasure hearing that that's exactly what browser I'm typing this with - don't ask.
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The worst part is that Chrome has now taken the lead in browser market share by a wide margin.
This is IE6 all over again, cause Google is pushing all their proprietary crap (like AMP), which benefits no one but themselves.
Show me logs (Score:2)
Put up or shut up. Show me packet captures of Chrome spying. Please, I'll wait.
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People care not. :( Renenber when people loved IE? And then Firefox?
Now they can brag Edge is better than Chrome (Score:2)
Because Chrome was made objectively worse.
Shared Blame? (Score:3, Interesting)
Full disclosure, I'm not the biggest Chrome fan, and not the biggest Google fan, either. However, I don't generally get caught up in browser wars; I don't generally tell Chrome users to use other browsers if they're happy with it and their sites load.
However, about a month ago, Chrome started acting really weird. Sites would time out, or take over a minute to load, on well-spec'd computers with no malware and wired network connections. After trying every tweak I could think of, I tried those same sites in Firefox and they loaded in the 2-3 seconds they were supposed to. Over the past month, that experience has repeated itself across users with nothing in common except Chrome, and "switching to Firefox" completely resolving their issues.
I'm sure the April update sucks; I'm hard pressed to point to a Win10 feature update that provided a useful feature that justified the update installation time. However, I'm hard pressed to not give Google at least some share of the blame when a number of users (some of which still using Windows 7) had issues with Chrome that were solved by switching to Firefox.
Opposite problem (Score:1)
Everyone is saying they switched to Firefox because Chrome was having issues for them.
Well, I've had the opposite problem, ever since Firefox moved to multi-process architecture, my Firefox kept hanging all the time, while Chrome would work fine. Annoying, but I haven't experienced the issue mention in the article with my Chrome at least.
Chrome witch hunt (Score:3, Funny)
Fake news! No crashes. Works perfe
and how is Edge browser running..? (Score:5, Insightful)
It ain't done 'til Lotus won't run...
My Chrome still works... (Score:2)
So google chrome is being google chrome? (Score:2)
I'm an extreme browser, nothing short of EXTREME - but damnit why can't they make these things more robust?
I have 32GB of high clocked DDR4, I've got an unoverclocked, 4ghz, 6 core, 2017 intel processor. My machine is a couple of grades off the best 'normal' desktop PC you can buy.
Chrome will still stutter playing back video. I thought flash was the enemy? Why is chrome 'doing stuff' with it's other tabs in the background, impacting my video playback?
I like the idea of multi-tasking, tabs doing some kind
Re: So google chrome is being google chrome? (Score:3)
As for suggestions
Re: (Score:2)
1, I've been an SSD guy since the Intel G2 160GB, couldn't use a PC without them.
2, Maybe, I wish I had a tool to monitor the actual system cause for this, rather than assume. Perhaps there is one. I can say one thing, it's easily recreated.
3, They should park at 0.1% CPU use tabs idle over 60 seconds, would possibly solve issues.
4, That's done
5, I'm unsure if this would help, it might, I probably have no more than 5 videos open at any one time (bear in mind, PAUSED and or not even started) in background t
Firefox (Score:2)
Chrome is freezing (Score:2)