Chrome Is Using AI To Fix Hundreds of Bugs, Eliminate Full Browser Restarts (piunikaweb.com) 29
Google says AI-assisted workflows helped Chrome fix 1,072 security bugs across versions 149 and 150, more than the previous 23 releases combined. The company is also testing twice-weekly security updates and "dynamic patching," which could apply most fixes without requiring users to restart the entire browser. "By leveraging Chrome's multi-process architecture, dynamic patching sequentially replaces background child processes (like the Renderer and GPU) with updated binaries on the fly," says Google in a blog post. PiunikaWeb reports: Alongside dynamic patching, Google is rolling out smarter background updates during periods of minimal user disruption. Starting with Chrome 150 on macOS, the browser takes advantage of the operating system's windowless state. If all Chrome windows are closed but the app remains running in the background, the browser will quietly auto-restart to apply pending updates.
For enterprise environments, IT admins can continue to manage fleet-wide deployments through Chrome Enterprise Core or enforce update prompts using the RelaunchNotification policy. Google's long-term vision is a browser that remains continuously protected in the background without interrupting your daily browsing session. In the meantime, you can manually trigger pending updates by clicking the update prompt in the top-right corner of Chrome.
For enterprise environments, IT admins can continue to manage fleet-wide deployments through Chrome Enterprise Core or enforce update prompts using the RelaunchNotification policy. Google's long-term vision is a browser that remains continuously protected in the background without interrupting your daily browsing session. In the meantime, you can manually trigger pending updates by clicking the update prompt in the top-right corner of Chrome.
That explains some shit (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:That explains some shit (Score:5, Funny)
I've noticed that chrome is dramatically less stable lately...
Yeah, but did you take a hit of that vibe code? Shits fyre, bruh. I'm talking 90% fresh.
Me and my Botz got you, bruh.
- Phat AI-bert
Re: That explains some shit (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Ask Intel if security fixes can slow down your CPU ...
Re: That explains some shit (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The slop-vibe will do that. I expect many of these vulnerabilities will only have been partially fixed on top of that and some "fixes" will have created new vulnerabilities. The attackers are having a celebration right now.
This isn't even news, it's a slashvertisment (Score:3, Insightful)
It would be funny if all these tools really did work though to the point where all the security vulnerabilities that that Israeli company uses to break into our phones for law enforcement got fixed up so that law enforcement couldn't just break into your phone anytime they want.
On the other hand the way the laws are changing right now and the way our civilization is rapidly going back to a feudal system of government we're not going to have enough civil liberties for any of that to matter but it's still an interesting thought experiment.
Re: (Score:2)
The thing is, Google is winning. Almost every browser is just a Chrome skin now. Firefox continues its slow spiral into irrelevance.
Funnily enough Firefox recently did the same thing. Integrated AI into the browser, and used AI to find bugs in the code. Shame they couldn't use AI to refactor the code into something that might actually gain some traction. There's a reason why every other browser is a Chrome skin.
Re: (Score:2)
Good job, you cracked the case.
Using AI to find and fix bugs... (Score:3)
...is the proper use of the technology.
Focusing strictly on "productivity' and churning out crappy software faster is not.
We need AI that helps us create better software: bug-free, efficient, secure, maintainable, well documented, with all edge cases handled.
Re: (Score:3)
We need AI that helps us create better software: bug-free, efficient, secure, maintainable, well documented, with all edge cases handled.
Except LLMs cannot do any of that, unless your standards are really low. To be fair, most of software industry has abysmally low standards for quality and security and LLMs may actually do better in many cases. Not they they would be able to do well.
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We need AI that helps us create better software: bug-free, efficient, secure, maintainable, well documented, with all edge cases handled.
In my experience AI does this exceptionally well already. You can describe your software architecture in excruciating detail, and AI (any frontier model FWIW) will happily dissect your plan and highlight all these little weaknesses, omissions, loose descriptions and contradictions, which would later hamper your software project. It's amazing, what it can find.
AI will also refine your architecture, and make very smart suggestions, if you have multiple options to chose from, and so on. Of course, it knows all
Re: Using AI to find and fix bugs... (Score:2)
If your pseudo code, sorry, I mean fine detail "architecture", is that comprehe dive you might just as well write actual code and let it fix that. IMO however AI code often doesnt even compile, has logical errors and is bloated. However YMMV.
Re: (Score:2)
If your pseudo code, sorry, I mean fine detail "architecture", is that comprehe dive you might just as well write actual code and let it fix that. IMO however AI code often doesnt even compile, has logical errors and is bloated. However YMMV.
Wrong approach. If you write code immediately, you will eventually get stuck in a rut, because an architectural concept shot from the hip typically doesn't hold water. I don't talk about javascript slop here barely holding a shitty web page together, I mean software that people actually depend on, and which you will have to maintain for years with updates and additions as the project scope moves and expands.
Once you sit down and actually design something, AI will help you by looking deeply into the system y
Re: (Score:2)
You're shilling. My experience of AI in the last few months is it makes cretinous assumptions, doesn't understand the overall concept and its code is often no better than that written by a student. Also I never suggested just sitting down and writing code but there gets to a point where architecture design gets so detailed its more or less at the code level anyway at which point you might as well start writing code. I've seen far too much pseudo code and UML that is less clear than if it had been written in
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What am I trying to sell you? Access to frontier models, that I have no control over, that I don't work for but work with?
The great thing about AI assisted architecture is, that you can start at a very coarse level and refine from there. If a lower level design stage discovers a flaw in my thinking, I can go back up. The biggest difference between AI assistants and a design team is, that the former will never go "please not this dummy again", if you show up with yet another "additional feature I need" or "h
Probably time to stop using Chrome then (Score:4, Insightful)
Letting AI do your coding is never a good idea. Patching included. There are now documented cases where LLM-done "security patches" created new vulnerabilities. And they have a tendency to not fully fix the original vulnerabilities on top of that.
"Cheaper than possible"-type fake engineering at its best.
Re: (Score:1)
I'm sure, that Microsoft's hand crafted "security fixes" would have never done such a thing :-D
Thorough testing (Score:3)
Changing out running code on the fly probably increases the number of corner cases by an order of magnitude.
What could possibly go wrong?
Why do browsers have so many bugs at all? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Because browsers are expected to be whole self contained isolated operating systems. The modern web is complicated. There's a reason you can literally run Windows 95 in your browser. https://www.pcjs.org/blog/2015... [pcjs.org]
Real bugs or typos in comments? (Score:2)
For over a year now, there's no way to turn off scrolling inertia (aka dynamic scrolling) in Chrome on Linux. The problem apparently being in the engine, Edge and Chromium have the same bug. While I've no idea what the utility of this "feature" is, I cant turn it off, and since no amount of bug reports are of any use, I hope AI can find/fix it
Yeah, I know, this means I'll be using Firefox with all its issues for a looooooong time.
Re: Real bugs or typos in comments? (Score:2)
Desktop Firefox is pretty good for me these days.
Mobile is trash, slashdot makes it crash multiple times a day. I'm using brave now, it has the best ad blocker...
Don't Care! (Score:3)
But that sounds like a bug.. (Score:3)
That is a bug, and no one can prove me wrong.
How many of those bugs were created by AI? (Score:2)
Google says AI-assisted workflows helped Chrome fix 1,072 security bugs across versions 149 and 150
That's an impressive statistic, but how many of the fixed bugs were created by AI-assisted workflows? More importantly: who tf is still using Chrome after google kneecapped the capabilities of adblockers such as UBlock Origin?