
WTF? Chromium (2016) - brudgers
http://raeknowler.com/wtf-chromium
======
agl
The fact that Chromium runs multiple processes is unrelated to any field
trials. Chromium has always been multi-process; that's why individual tabs and
plugins can crash without taking down the whole browser. Additionally,
multiple processes are needed in order to implement sandboxing on Linux.

Field trials have long been a part of Chromium too:
[https://blog.chromium.org/2012/05/changes-to-field-trials-
in...](https://blog.chromium.org/2012/05/changes-to-field-trials-
infrastructure.html). They are used to experiment with different solutions or,
sometimes, to allow a change to be quickly reverted in the field if it's
causing a problem. You can manually enable/disable several of these on
chrome://flags/ (although it's not advised).

~~~
xg15
And? All that is written in the article. The question is whether or not
forcing users to partake in field trials is a good idea.

~~~
jkrems
But that question doesn't make sense. It contains the assumption that the
alternative would be to never ship broken features to users. While the
_actual_ alternative would be that they'd ship the same broken feature to
_all_ users. Because at some point there's no other testing left.

~~~
khedoros1
If they're shipping features that need testing, it seems like the Beta version
is the right place to ship them, not the stable Chrome or Chromium build. As
in: ship the possibly-broken features to people who have already opted into
testing, and don't subject your users that chose the "stable" to random
testing.

Getting the bad end of someone's unannounced feature testing is the kind of
thing that makes me decide to use another browser for a few months, hoping
that the problem disappears if/when I go back to it.

~~~
mcbits
If they're _not_ running new features through their Beta channel, then you
have a point. Otherwise, I'd assume the features that make it to field trials
have already gone through Beta testing and are thought to be ready to release
--which isn't always the case, hence the gradual rollout.

~~~
khedoros1
I'd say that if they're doing A/B testing or "field trials", then they aren't
sure enough to roll the feature out to Stable. That's not Google's policy,
though.

They run experiments in Canary, Dev, and Beta, then conduct a roll-out to
stable to get a broader test (per the explanation here):
[https://textslashplain.com/2017/10/18/chrome-field-
trials/](https://textslashplain.com/2017/10/18/chrome-field-trials/)

I'm just grumpy that we don't live in the perfect world, where confusion-
inducing processes like this wouldn't be necessary. I've never been that
comfortable with the "break a few eggs" method of progress.

------
tardygrad
Or just use Firefox, even if it is slightly slower than Chromium it's at least
a browser that works for you not one that treats you as a pawn.

A Chrome monoculture is harmful, even if Google has the best intentions which
I don't think they do - they definitely value their profits over an open web.

~~~
mariusmg
>even if it is slightly slower than Chromium

Funny thing is Firefox Quantum is both faster and eats less memory compared
with Chrome.

>not one that treats you as a pawn.

And sadly, Firefox is the only browser that doesn't treat you like a pawn. For
MS, Google, Apple, that chinese company which owns Opera you are just a pawn.

(later edit : fixed the second remark).

~~~
akerro
>And sadly, Firefox is the only browser that does this.

Not any more, I recently discovered that my firefox at work got infected with
Firefox Pioneer. I didn't install that, it just appeared on list of my addons,
no warning or anything. I heard on Reddit about similar cases from a few
months ago, people got Safe Browsing installed without their knowledge. Both
are signed addons from Mozilla.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/firefox-
pioneer/](https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/firefox-pioneer/)

~~~
unethical_ban
>at work

Is youre IT group policy doing this?

~~~
akerro
Small company, we don't have such policies, root account on my PC at work
belongs to me. It's Ubuntu.

your _

------
yongjik
Would the author be happier if Chrome/Chromium didn't do these "field trials",
and instead just enabled whatever feature they were testing for all users, and
the author was hit with the same problem, along with everyone else?

When you cut through the rhetorics, the author is basically complaining that
Chromium decided to update itself. Well, maybe it warrants complaint, but I
fail to see what's such a big deal. (The alternative is millions using
browsers ridden with last year's vulnerabilities.)

~~~
CapacitorSet
>the author is basically complaining that Chromium decided to update itself.
Well, maybe it warrants complaint, but I fail to see what's such a big deal.
(The alternative is millions using browsers ridden with last year's
vulnerabilities.)

You're misrepresenting mandatory enrolment in A/B testing with plain software
updates. Firefox is an example of a browser that does software updates, but
does not force you to use potentially buggy features - and yet they do not
have "millions using browsers ridden with last year's vulnerabilities",
because their alternative is to give users a choice to enroll in experiments.
I do participate in experiments since I wish to improve Firefox, but I could
switch to any time to no experiments at all.

~~~
yongjik
A/B testing is not some nefarious scheme to harm users. When Google or Mozilla
wants to add a new feature, there are basically three choices:

(1) Opt-in: Add the feature to the new version. Users must choose to upgrade.

(2) Opt-out: Roll out the new version automatically, unless the user actively
choose not to.

(2a) Opt-out with A/B test: Roll out the new version to a small portion of
users first, and proceed if nobody catches fire.

Once you decided to use opt-out, there aren't that much difference between (2)
and (2a). The major difference is that with (2a), a _smaller_ number of users
are hit when an unforeseen bug inevitably finds itself into release process.

And of course we know what happens when something like a web browser relies on
the users to actively click "Upgrade". I'm sure there are some people still
using IE6.

------
deathanatos
1\. I'm not seeing the causal link between the flag and the symptoms. I often
find "Chrome" "causing" the same problems, but typically you can judge from
the memory use that an errant tab is allocating the world, and you've started
drawing on swap, which of course slows things down. But here we've cropped the
memory stats out of the screenshot from top (for the system as a whole; we can
see a few processes consuming a few hundred MiB, but Chrome loves processes,
and there could be several more below, and summing RAM usage from processes is
a deceptively tricky beast), and I can see nothing to prove that the field
trial is even to blame.

2\. You get the browser for free. If everyone adopted this same attitude,
Chrome would not be able to do real-world A/B testing on features; what should
they do instead, just release it all or nothing? You might have been unlucky
today, but perhaps tomorrow someone else's misery provides the needed data to
prevent a bad feature from going out.

3\. Vote with your "feet", and switch to Firefox? (or one of the other myriad
of browsers out there…)

~~~
FascinatedBox
What other serious alternatives are out there though? I know of Firefox and
Edge. But aren't Opera and Safari now reskins of Chromium, to some degree?

~~~
dragonwriter
Blink (Chromium’s engine) was forked from WebKit (Safari’s Engine) and the two
have developed separately. Safari is not a skin of Chromium or vice versa.

------
edhelas
I think that we are getting too dependent on this browser/engine
(Chrome/Chromium/Electron and the many others derivatives).

This will create serious issues in the future regarding how Google is caring
about respecting the market, the standards and their users in general.

Hopefully Mozilla has done a quite impressive work on Firefox those past few
months and I personally don't see any advantages anymore for Chrome.

~~~
fenwick67
It seems crazy to me how may projects depend on Chromium and V8 directly.

Hopefully with Firefox's new improvements some of this will change.

~~~
oatmealsnap
Aside from community support, what is preventing Firefox's JS engine from
being used to power a JS runtime?

~~~
bzbarsky
Nothing really, and people use it for that. For example,
[https://github.com/0ad/0ad/tree/master/libraries/source/spid...](https://github.com/0ad/0ad/tree/master/libraries/source/spidermonkey)

------
millstone
The love for Firefox seems misplaced, given that 1% of Firefox downloaders get
a version that sends what you type to a third party (Cliqz).

HN discussion was
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15421708](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15421708)

~~~
prophesi
Only 1% of German users.

Yet, even though it affects only a super small set of users, it's still a
ridiculous thing for Firefox to do.

From the article: "One of Mozilla’s core privacy principles is No Surprises:
we will use and share data in ways that are transparent and benefit our users.
That is why we are telling you about this today. "

Which doesn't make sense. If one of your _core_ privacy principles is to tell
your users what you're using & collecting, why not just tell them before/while
downloading? Or better yet, let this be opt-in?

This isn't big enough of a mishap for "the love" to be misplaced, but it is
enough to always be wary of what even the most privacy-minded companies do
with their products.

------
the_common_man
[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=318572](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=318572)
is the issue

~~~
deusum
Status: WontFix Closed: Nov 2013

------
otto_ortega
For a developer there is no better browser than Firefox Developer Edition 58+
at the moment, its new Quantum engine is insanely fast and the included
developers tools are far superior than the ones on Chrome.

I know Firefox had a dark period on which it felt behind Chrome on most
fronts, but those days are over, if you haven't used it on a while, give it
try! you won regret it.

------
Tyriar
Iridium's stable release is based on Chromium v61 and Chrome is on v62. Sure
they can boast about enhanced privacy, but I'm not so sure about security
unless their base Chromium version is always up to date.

------
jdlyga
Chrome honestly hasn't improved much in a while. It's kind of like where
Firefox was back in 2012. Now that Firefox is faster and more efficient, maybe
they'll start putting more effort back into it.

------
vardump
I once debugged an issue in another process on Windows that would _only_
appear when Chrome was _not_ running.

Not sure if Chrome still always does it, but back then it was because Chrome
changed timer tick frequency to presumably 1 ms by calling timeBeginPeriod
([https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/windows/desktop/dd7...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/windows/desktop/dd757624\(v=vs.85\).aspx)).

On Windows, this affects whole system timer resolution and caused problematic
timing code in the other process to function correctly.

Funny enough, earlier workaround was to only run this piece of software with a
Chrome window open.

------
finchisko
What happened to "Don't be evil?". Or they changed it to "Do not eval?":D.

Bit off topic, but that guy experienced lagginess in UI due some rogue Chrome
process. I remember some bug in VLC that slow down my computer to level, it
was not even possible to type on keyboard.

And I wonder, why is this happening in era of multicore CPUs? Why there is no
restriction (by default) for process, how many cores it can utilise? I mean
the tooling is already there (cgroups on Linux), but they're not used by
default.

------
ryuuchin
Isn't the answer here to just run the latest stable version where the impact
of field trials would be minimized? Even the stable version will probably have
features/field trials in the command line if you start looking at it for
render processes. It was also never established if this A-B testing through
field trials was to blame. It is a valid way to roll out new features to users
while trying to minimize breakage. Most of the unstable stuff happens with the
unstable branches in any case (dev and to a lesser extent beta).

I do realize this isn't the best answer but I thought that the closer you get
to canary/dev branch the more variation you'll be subject to. You can force
field trials on and off at the command line if you know the option name and
how to format it correctly.

e.g. for some older ones:

    
    
        --force-fieldtrials="EnableWin32kLockDownMimeTypes/Default/*EnableAppContainer/Enabled/"

------
lima
The author assumes that the field trial command line arguments are somehow
related to the issue he had, which is not the case.

Chrome is always running multiple processes and they always have a very large
number of arguments, including field trials. He's just describing normal
behavior.

------
tzahola
I’d appreciate a curated list of software vendors who don’t run these kind of
field tests/experiment/whatever on their users. Extra points if their products
are not filled with bloated “”””analytics”””” crapware either.

------
yuhong
The funny thing is that it is not difficult to prove the exact cause with a
debugger and symbols in cases like this either. I wonder if doing what Process
Explorer does (quickly suspend/resume threads and display call stack) would be
easy in Linux though.

------
yuhong
This reminds me of this Twitter thread about DiagTrack:
[https://twitter.com/yuhong2/status/869631096719261696](https://twitter.com/yuhong2/status/869631096719261696)

------
arunc
Is chromium builds available on Windows (not Google's chrome)?

~~~
kodablah
Shameless plug, my browser is:
[https://cretz.github.io/doogie/](https://cretz.github.io/doogie/). I do no
telemetry, surprise feature testing, etc. There are of course others, the best
of which is Ungoogled Chromium, but they are a bit behind on their updates.

------
md_
The article appears to assert two things:

1\. Chrome runs field trials. 2\. At one point Chrome locked up the author's
computer.

Does it ever connect the two points, or are they unrelated?

------
porfirium
The Iridium website and logo look so professional and "enterprisey" that it
looks like there's lots of money behind of it and they're going to screw you.
A barebones or even text-only website would do them a favour.

~~~
hathawsh
I don't think that's a fair assessment. The web site
([https://iridiumbrowser.de/](https://iridiumbrowser.de/)) is nearly on par
with the web sites for other big open source projects like
[http://python.org](http://python.org) or [http://ruby-lang.org](http://ruby-
lang.org) .

I think it just needs minor tweaks. I would replace the marquee with static
text and replace the section title "Manifest" with something clearer like "Our
Purpose" or "Our Ambition".

~~~
porfirium
I clicked on the Iridium website and I only see one line of text in uppercase.
It has nothing to do with Python's or Ruby's.

The Iridium website gives me the impression I'm downloading something akin to
Comodo's browser.

And it's constructive criticism anyway.

------
peterwwillis
As lame as Firefox is, it always works when I need it to (unless I use add-
ons). Thanks for sucking the least, Firefox.

~~~
oatmealsnap
Check out the Beta, or wait for Firefox Quantum to get released next week.
It's FAST!

~~~
peterwwillis
I don't need fast, I need a secondary browser. It can be slow as long as it
works. (Firefox hasn't been fast or unbloated since Phoenix/Firebird 1.5)

