

Goodbye, Chrome (How Chrome got me banned from hacker news) - apersson
http://blettr.com/3jgy3amnzfvm2b5swdd4fg82rytjmsvqc

======
grovulent
I understand it's a bit superficial to re-enforce the common sense rejoinder
discussed at the end about not using developer builds.

\- but isn't the idea of using a developer build at least partly an issue of
wanting to discover bugs like these and report them, as opposed to just
getting access to the latest and greatest new features? You know, so you make
a contribution to the cause?

It is annoying though that an install of both chrome devs and the ie9 betas
overwrite the stable versions. The firefox beta at least installed elsewhere
so I can easily use the old version if I like without having to dick around
with it.

~~~
brianpan
From the blog post:

>How the hell can a program at this level of maturity have such a massive
problem...

Because it's a dev build! Do people really need to be reminded of that! Dev
builds are for developers!

So what if the FF dev build is more stable? Both sites _explicitly_ say they
are unstable and for testing only. To have a problem and blame the dev build
is insane. Any "self-respecting geek" should know that.

~~~
grovulent
Yeah - I was using the Chrome dev for a while. It was so stable for so long
that I completely forgot I was using it. Then one day some weird stuff started
happening. I got all upset and ranty like the guy from this article until
finally my higher mind said: 'it's a dev build you fool!' - I felt stupid and
went back to stable.

At least I came to my senses eventually.... before I had written some rantox
that had made it to the top of hacker news... <thank god>

~~~
jaden
At least you were smart enough to call yourself a fool before someone else did
it for you.

I've been running Chrome dev for several months and have just about forgotten
it's a dev. So far I haven't hit any major issues.

------
msbarnett
You might consider looking into something like Instapaper[1] or Read It
Later[2] for your offline reading needs, rather than try to maintain an
unwieldily tab set.

[1] <http://www.instapaper.com/>

[2] <http://readitlaterlist.com/>

~~~
brianpan
Another nice feature is that you can read just the text without all the other
'junk', like Readability <http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/> does
for you.

Handy for this blog post because there's something preventing scrolling the
page on the iPad. Reads fine in Instapaper though!

------
pg
Has anyone else had this happen? I can loosen the ban thresholds if it's a
common problem with Chrome.

~~~
pavs
Its not a common problem with Chrome. Its a common problem with someone who
uses a browser like an idiot.

Using a dev build of a browser, then opening 100s(?) of tabs, not using a
flashblock. I don't care which browser you use, if you have 100s of tabs open
and you have flash running, your memory usage will balloon without you having
to do anything wrong at all.

After the browser crashed, he restarted his tabs (it usually prompts you to
open previous tabs in stable version) that caused his browser to crash in the
first place? What did he expect was going to happpen? Not crash this time?

Also the guy is using dev version. What is he bitching about?

~~~
bad_user
Dude, relax, take a Valium or something.

Also IMHO, using "flashblock" is disrespectful of other people's work. If a
website bothers you so much, stop visiting it and go somewhere else. It's kind
of like voting with your wallet and it works ;)

~~~
pavs
> Also IMHO, using "flashblock" is disrespectful of other people's work. If a
> website bothers you so much, stop visiting it and go somewhere else. It's
> kind of like voting with your wallet and it works ;)

I could use the same silly reasoning and argue that overuse of flash is
disrespectful to users but that would make us both sound stupid.

~~~
bad_user
So when going to the Mall, it is OK to steal because you don't like the
checkout experience?

It's only silly in the wrong context: Wikipedia's value is coming from its
users. Google's value comes from them.

------
seancron
I currently have 72 tabs open. Yes, I am a tab addict and I need to go through
and close/bookmark many of those tabs (and install a tab limiting extension).
However, only a few of those a HN tabs. Many of them are stories linked to by
HN.

I have the same exact problem as the OP. I'm running Chromium 9.0.567.0 on
Ubuntu 10.04 and a couple of days ago I was getting the same error page. I
wondered why I was getting this error. I tried clearing the cookies thinking
there was something wrong with my login cookie and using different browsers,
but nothing worked.

The only thing that made sense was that my IP was banned, which confused me
seeing as I didn't think I had done anything worthy of being IP banned.

Luckily, I saw this post (on a different IP address) and I'm certainly going
to use a less bleeding edge version of Chromium from now on.

p.s. If you see this PG, can you please unban my IP? I promise to use a
browser that won't bombard HN with requests, and to use less tabs :)

Edit: For the record, I only had 3 HN tabs open. For people wondering how 3
tabs could trigger a flood of requests, check out this reply to PG
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1872177>

~~~
redthrowaway
So you work for Mozilla but have dozens of tabs open in chromium? I'm
interested as to why this is the case. I've found Chrome to simply be a
_nicer_ browser. It does everything I want, and nothing I don't. I switched
from FF about a year ago, and haven't looked back. I can even deal with all of
the flash problems with a copy of FF that I open should I need it.

What's your rationale for being such a heavy chrome user? Is it market
research, or personal preference?

~~~
seancron
Check the usernames again. I am not sayrer, but he had an insightful comment
worth linking to.

Personally, I do prefer Chrome/Chromium, even though it uses more ram and cpu
than firefox 3+.

~~~
redthrowaway
My mistake. I assumed when you linked to that reply that your were linking to
your own reply, but I failed to check the usernames.

------
Locke1689
Maybe I'm dense but I can't figure out what kind of bug the OP is claiming is
acting up here. Does Chrome just sometimes decide to send hundreds of HTTP GET
requests for no reason? Is it attempting to pipeline per the HTTP spec and
just screwing up? This article is so high on rant and low on information I
can't tell what's going on. Have you checked if there's a bug report or filed
one yourself?

~~~
pyre
Sounds like he has an ungodly amount of tabs open and Chrome isn't smart
enough to say, "Hey, I have 50+ tabs open on the same website, maybe I
shouldn't try to refresh all of them at the same time."

~~~
re
But why refresh them at all? Once a page is open in a background tab, surely
Chrome won't just refresh it in a loop for the hell of it?

------
srean
I am a serial tab abuser. Its my lazy Instapaper. As bad as that sounds on its
own, I often would not close firefox, in fear of restarting it later and fire
a cascade of page loads. After a few days FF would have grabbed a major chunk
of my RAM (even with flashblock).

The Restore Control add-on <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/177558/> is a big relief. It opens a tab but does not load
the content unless I actually click on it. I can now easily close and restore
FF. It comes up in a (slowish :-) snap, as it only loads the last page that
was active. The rest are opened as "empty" tabs to be loaded on demand.

~~~
redthrowaway
This is entirely off-topic, but your reply made me instantly think of Randall
Munroe's comic about how emoticons and parentheses are mutually exclusive.

~~~
srean
<http://xkcd.com/541/> for the context

------
apersson
Ok, a few replies:

1\. Point on signal versus noise taken. A large part had to do with that I
didn't have the time and skill to dive into problem more deeply (e.g. to get
some sort of request trace from Chromium and file it as a bug). It was late, I
should only post in the morning after sleeping on my posts.

2\. Point on dev builds (and Chrome vs. Chromium) also taken. I realize it's
one thing to use "trunk" on something that I use as a developer, where I
engage with the software as a producer, and another to use it for software
that I just want to work and not worry about it. I will switch my browsers to
stable versions, since I'm a browser consumer, not developer.

3\. Number of open tabs: During this incident, I had perhaps 40 to 50 tabs
open, with around 10 to 15 hacker news pages.

4\. Requests on restart were not the problem - I connected the browser to a
dead proxy before restarting, and then went through the tabs stopping each one
manually. Only after that did I reactivate my connection. My annoyance came
from the fact that Chromium just started hammering away at pages "behind my
back" so to speak, after I had manually told it to stop trying to connect.

5\. Thanks for your recommendations on bookmarking alternatives.

6\. I posted this here because hacker news was the only site that issued me a
fairly explicit ban, and I wanted to help others with the same problem out. A
few people responded that they've had the same/similar problems, so it wasn't
a total waste.

------
riprock
My old roommate used to be a tab whore -- it got so bad that eventually every
time he opened up firefox a million tabs would try to load up and temporarily
kill our bandwidth.

Anyway, I don't know how many tabs you keep open but I'm sure a little
organization can drastically cut them down (get in a habit of hitting ctrl+w
once you're done with a 'dead end' page.) If organization is too hard just
periodically close everything and it won't be too bad.

~~~
pyre
Or at least moving to something like Instapaper, ReadItLater, or (on Firefox)
MAFF.

------
shortformblog
Just a suggestion, buddy:

[https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/egnjhciaieeiiohk...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/egnjhciaieeiiohknchakcodbpgjnchh)

Here's the Tab Wrangler plugin. I have a problem with keeping a bajillion tabs
open, too, but instead of just leaving them open, I have this thing clean up
after my mess. There are similar plugins for Firefox, too, by the way.

------
eddanger
Just curious, how many tabs did you have open? Also a Flash blocking extension
seems like it would come in handy in your multi-tab situation.

~~~
fossuser
I suspect it was an enormous number of tabs, either way it the browser
shouldn't have been causing enough requests to get him banned.

------
al_james
I am the complete opposite. Having more than 4 tabs open feels like working at
an untidy desk. I can't cope with it!

------
jeffmould
For about the last week or two I have been randomly receiving the same error:

"Error 324 (net::ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE): Unknown error."

when navigating to a page. I am running Chrome 7.0.517.41 on both Windows
Vista and Windows 7 and experience the issue on both systems. Usually I can
just hit refresh and the page loads properly, with no problems. Sometimes
though I find myself having to close Chrome altogether and restart.

After reading this I will have to look and see if it is doing something
similar when it gets this error. The error is very random and doesn't matter
if I have one tab or 15 tabs open. I rarely keep more than 10-15 tabs open at
once though.

------
DjDarkman
Why not just Bookmark pages you want to read later? By the way, I keep a lot
of tabs open and I had never such problem with Chrome. And I don't think it's
fair to blame Chrome(you meant Chromium) for Flash's bus.

------
wccrawford
Interesting. I frequent a site that I open dozens of tabs on every day. If you
open more than a few at the same time, it will tell you that you are abusing
the system. I keep those tabs open for quite a while sometimes.

I've done that with the Chrome beta for Linux and Windows both.

I have never had it tell me that I'm abusing the system while I had those tabs
open.

Not saying it doesn't happen, but that there may be more than meets the eye
here... It might not even be Chrome, but Flash, or an extension or something
else.

------
gxs
If I use the anonymouse.org proxy (I use it because I like accessing isohunt),
I get kicked off after a while. I usually just load it in firefox now without
any problems.

I wonder if this is the reason I get kicked off.

------
jrockway
So no details on what is happening?

My guess (without trying it myself) is that HN's web server is not following
some HTTP protocol, which is confusing Chrome.

------
known
Is it possible for the browser to prefetch _hwinfo_ from the computer and
customize the installation accordingly?

------
growt
From my experience the chrome dev-build on linux crashes a lot, whereas the
mac dev-build ist really usable.

------
the_jc
On an unrelated note, your blog renders broken on the iPad; scrolling down the
page does not work.

------
sliverstorm
Why the heck do people open this many tabs? Bookmarks exist for a reason.

I rarely let myself go beyond 8-10, because tabs are essentially useless and
forgotten once the density increases to the point you can't read the tab
title. (note: I _do_ only have a 12" screen, so this number is lower than some
people)

------
drivebyacct2
This is a joke right? You opened a lot of tabs, were surprised that it sent a
lot of requests, and are blaming the browser?

Am I missing something? If you save your tabs and reopen them, what exactly do
you expect besides it trying to... open them?

~~~
jaden
The complaint was that after he stopped loading the page, each tab would
request the page again, not that a browser full of tabs loaded all the pages
once.

------
bhiggins
the lesson here is to disable flash

