[HN Gopher] Chrome 100
___________________________________________________________________
Chrome 100
Author : NiekvdMaas
Score : 160 points
Date : 2022-03-29 19:19 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (chromereleases.googleblog.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (chromereleases.googleblog.com)
| staticassertion wrote:
| I think Chrome may be the single most impactful piece of software
| with regards to end-user security. Click to play plugins,
| sandboxed flash, sandboxed renderer, process isolation, auto
| updates, etc.
|
| Chrome completely changed the threat landscape in just a few
| years.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| I believe they hit this milestone a little faster than you might
| expect (if you've been using Chrome for a long time) because
| previously Chrome was on a 6-week release cycle and they recently
| (within the last year or 2) switched to a 4-week cadence.
|
| https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs...
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Early chrome was a breath of fresh air. Design was light, it was
| fast, and it felt like the promise of the web will soon pay off.
|
| Unfortunately, it helped kill the hated IE6/7 dragon only to take
| it's place. If you value the free internet and open standards,
| use Firefox. It is not important how's good chrome is or how
| beautiful it is (it actually isn't, early design was way better),
| because, after the demise of Opera, Firefox is the last
| alternative browser engine we have. We don't want one company
| decide the standards, it'll end badly.
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| Just as IE6 took the place of the hated Netscape Navigator 4.7!
|
| Die a hero, live long enough, yadda yadda
| vdfs wrote:
| > We don't want one company decide the standards
|
| It's already the case, Firefox lost a long time ago
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Then do your part regardless. Use Firefox everywhere, and
| eventually, it'll have enough users to prevent that one
| company from fully owning the web and the standards.
| birken wrote:
| Part of the reason that IE6/7 was so annoying is that those
| browsers had a large market share but also lacked the features
| of the other leading browsers so you always had to bend over
| backwards to make your code support both.
|
| Chrome does not have that problem. I fully appreciate the
| monopoly/privacy concerns, but Chrome being the market leading
| browser is 100x better from a development perspective then when
| you had to worry about IE6.
| [deleted]
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Well, I recon safari counts for something? I guess they forked
| a while back from whatever chrome is using.
|
| But yes, support Firefox. I've been using it for a decade,
| there have been ups and downs, but at the moment there's
| nothing I would change with it.
|
| I have to have chrome installed, like everyone else, for that
| one form that only works in chrome (or, I use it as the browser
| without any ad-blocking for when I need that..), but besides
| that I use it for everything work wise. The argument about the
| devtools isn't true anymore.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> I recon safari counts for something? I guess they forked a
| while back from whatever chrome is using._
|
| Safari used WebKit, and Chrome initially did as well. In 2013
| Chrome forked WebKit to make Blink:
| https://blog.chromium.org/2013/04/blink-rendering-engine-
| for...
| freedomben wrote:
| I use and love Firefox, but I don't think it's really fair to
| say Chrome is the new IE. The biggest reason why IE was a
| nightmare was because they were slow to implement new things,
| and had weird unpredictable behavior and bugs that only showed
| up in IE. You also had to have Windows in order to test with
| it. On top of that, crappy or nonexistent dev tools. Also (not
| their fault, but) many company IT policies required use of IE.
| Installing Firefox or Chrome made you a rebel ;-)
|
| Chrome is far from perfect but they implement things fast and
| have great dev tools. If anything, I feel like Safari is the
| new IE. You have to have a Mac to test it, it's slow to adopt
| new features (sometimes aggravatingly slow), and it breaks in
| weird ways that Chrome and Firefox don't. I can't speak to the
| dev tools in Safari but I'd love to hear from someone how those
| compare to Chrome.
| ______-_-______ wrote:
| I would say the opposite. IE was popular long ago because
| they were fastest to implement new features. IE is the reason
| XMLHttpRequest has such a silly name. IE supported CSS grid 5
| years before anyone else[1]. The problem is they tried to
| force features on everyone instead of collaborating. That
| started decades ago with the <marquee> tag trying to stand
| out against netscape, and never really stopped until IE11 got
| feature frozen. Now IE is left with a "grid" that's different
| from everyone else's "grid", because everyone else waited for
| consensus.
|
| Google is playing the exact same game now with things like
| manifest v3 and federated cohorts, etc. They're winning the
| game so far. They may keep winning forever, or they may not.
| We can only wait and see.
|
| [1] https://caniuse.com/css-grid
| ajdude wrote:
| The issue in this case, I believe, is that Google is using
| its dominance as the primary rendering engine to strongarm
| its own standards. If they want something, they just
| implement it in chrome and everyone must follow, least the
| smaller browsers fails to load more and more websites.
| slowwriter wrote:
| I think the larger tech community should be made more aware of
| this. Maybe if the likes of LTT or MKBHD (popular YouTube tech
| channels) could be convinced to do a video on it, it could help
| get more people into the Firefox camp
| staticassertion wrote:
| Doesn't Chrome already effectively decide standards? What do
| they do that isn't standards compliant anyway?
|
| AFAIK they push new web standards all the time, and even if
| they didn't, they have the vast majority of the market share so
| the boat's sailed on Firefox imo.
| RubyRidgeRandy wrote:
| Agreed. I also always feel like linux communities or
| hackernews is gaslighting me into thinking that firefox is
| just as fast as chrome. It's not. There is a tangible speed
| difference when using it.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| I use it on a M1 and in my (totally subjective) experience
| it goes in order of fastest to slowest: safari, firefox,
| then chrome for speed on heavy websites...
| least wrote:
| There's also webkit, though there is no webkit browser on
| Windows, as far as I know.
|
| I do use Firefox, but Mozilla really goes out of their way to
| betray their core audience more and more with addons like
| Pocket being integrated into the browser along with
| advertisements in the new tab window.
|
| In either case it always feels like no matter what browser I'm
| using there are huge tradeoffs in one sense or another, which I
| never felt when I originally started using Firefox early on or
| early Chrome.
| tormock wrote:
| > I do use Firefox, but Mozilla really goes out of their way
| to betray their core audience more and more with addons like
| Pocket being integrated into the browser along with
| advertisements in the new tab window.
|
| They also removed many useful features and hide useful
| settings... (one example being the RSS feed finding feature
| .... luckily there's an addon that you can install that does
| a pretty good job, it is called Awesome RSS)
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| > there is no webkit browser on Windows
|
| But there is for every other OS.
|
| Macs can use Safari, obviously.
|
| On Linux, KDE users (or other Qt based desktops) can use
| Falkon, and GNOME users (or other GTK based desktops) can use
| GNOME Web.
| least wrote:
| Yeah, I didn't mention Linux because there are actual
| builds that are baked into many systems or easily
| installed. On Windows there seems to be a way to run
| webkit, but not viably as a daily driver web browser.
|
| Webkit browsers in linux feel a bit half baked as well,
| though, when you compare it against Firefox and Chromium.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| > Webkit browsers in linux feel a bit half baked as well,
| though, when you compare it against Firefox and Chromium.
|
| They're just browsers. They don't have built-in web
| services, they don't dial home, they don't sync your
| history and bookmarks with some unknown service. Frankly,
| this is a positive.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> there is no webkit browser on Windows_
|
| WebKit does build on Windows, and it's possible to use bare
| WebKit: https://schepp.dev/posts/running-webkit-on-windows/
| kentrf wrote:
| I've stopped using Chrome a while back, due to it being a too
| integrated with Google services.
|
| However, Chrome is an engineering marvel and well polished.
|
| Congrats on version 100.
| spicybright wrote:
| You could definitely argue it's the most important piece of
| software in the world, possibly besides whatever popular OS is
| running it. For the vast majority of humans, it IS the
| internet.
| haolez wrote:
| I'd say the most important software is Excel.
| goosedragons wrote:
| No, that's the most abused software in the world. Poor lil'
| Excel forced to do things it really never should.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| The same could be said for the browser
| user_7832 wrote:
| I mean, I don't think students are forced to run an
| operating system in _Excel_... (yet?) ;)
| enos_feedler wrote:
| The browser is certainly being tasked as an operating
| system to run "web apps"
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Nah, that was gcc.
| daneel_w wrote:
| No, but you could argue it's among the most used pieces of
| software in the world. That's a great distinction. Chrome is
| entirely replaceable.
| idonotknowwhy wrote:
| I only use it when some crappy site is only tested in Chrome
| and fails to run in Firefox. 10 years ago, I had to use
| Internet Explorer sometimes for the same reason.
| dharmab wrote:
| What other software would appear in the top 100? I'd guess
| curl, the major C compilers, the major OS kernels, Microsoft
| Office and Adobe Acrobat to name a few.
| flatiron wrote:
| Nginx, Java jdk/jre
| nicoburns wrote:
| I'd guess Firefox would make the list too, despite having a
| much lower install base than Chrome.
|
| If you include hosted services, then I guess the major ones
| like Google Search, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube,
| TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, Wikipedia, etc. I guess email
| providers too: Gmail and Hotmail at least.
| nicoburns wrote:
| There was a recent post on HN where it was tangentially
| mentioned that Chrome has 3.1 billion users! There can't be
| much software in the world with that kind of reach. I guess
| stuff like curl, but certainly not end user software.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Not user facing, but there are estimated to be over a
| trillion SQLite databases in use
|
| https://www.sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html
| cyberpunk wrote:
| _cough_ libc.so..
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Whatever Cisco IOS services comprise the networking stack
| of core backbone routers are effectively used by every
| single user that connects to the Internet. That's every
| human user but also all of the devices that connect without
| needing a user, which is probably a much greater number
| than the entire human population of the planet.
| Micoloth wrote:
| I mean.. For many many humans, the Internet is Facebook
| running on a mobile device. Also, do they use Chrome in
| China?
|
| So I don't know about vast majority.
|
| Definitely one of the most reliable pieces of software that I
| use though, no doubt about that.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > Also, do they use Chrome in China?
|
| yes
| https://www.scmp.com/abacus/tech/article/3103747/google-
| chro...
| Dig1t wrote:
| *for certain definitions of importance
|
| If Chrome disappeared I think everyone would still have
| access to the internet and a lot of people would argue that
| we'd all be better off for it.
|
| You are right though, it can and does have a ridiculously
| large impact on people's lives.
| brokencode wrote:
| Sure, there are competitors so that if Chrome disappeared,
| we'd be fine.
|
| But imagine if Chrome had never existed. Chrome was so much
| better when it came out that it saved us from Internet
| Explorer hell.
|
| I don't want to picture what Microsoft would have had in
| store for us if Chrome hadn't come around.
| aloisdg wrote:
| I would argue that Opera were better than Chrome feature-
| wise.
| pkaye wrote:
| I feel like Firefox fumbled a bit in the early days of
| Chrome that many people switched over to Chrome.
| NTARelix wrote:
| I might be remembering the timeline wrong, but I was
| perfectly happy using Firefox when I first heard of
| Chrome. When I switched from Firefox to Chrome I was very
| impressed with the improvements in design, performance,
| and greater set of useful features. Definitely some steps
| in the right direction, but I believe we had already been
| saved from IE. These days there are many browsers to
| choose from (though most seem to be built on Chromium,
| which we wouldn't have without Chrome) and the
| competition is fun to spectate.
|
| The big improvement for me that Firefox had over IE was
| tabs, though I'm sure there were many other UX
| improvements that my young mind didn't recognize or hold
| onto.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The only interesting thing Chrome added was process per
| tab, which isn't particularly interesting. Firefox had at
| least 25% market share in 2010.
| markstos wrote:
| With 9 known high severity vulns in release 99 this replaces,
| looks like they need a few more dozen releases to really get this
| polished.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| Is the phenomenon described at http://www.chromeisbad.com still
| happening? Does the Keystone updater cause slow performance on
| MacOS when using external displays?
| saagarjha wrote:
| There was never really any good evidence backing it.
| judge2020 wrote:
| To add, the author only profiled within Resource Monitor,
| which was like the cause: WindowServer _shouldn 't_ have a
| massive increase of CPU, but a bug since Catalina sometimes
| does cause it to do super inefficient WindowServer stuff:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25401681
| johndfsgdgdfg wrote:
| The site was made mostly to rile up HN users. So HN crowd can
| indulge their daily ritual of bashing Google. AFAIR the post
| reached the top spot of front page. Although it was flagged
| later.
| eatonphil wrote:
| Pretty neat to see them list out all the bug reports and bug
| bounties paid. I don't know if that's common but it's the first
| time I've seen it.
|
| It's also a little odd to see a release announcement where they
| call out that none of the new features are in this post but will
| be announced later on.
| pdoconnell wrote:
| Time to find out how many applications have regexes with a user
| agent parser with version /d{2} instead of /d+.
| eklitzke wrote:
| I haven't followed exactly where they landed on this but both
| Firefox and Chrome have been testing user-agent strings with
| version 100+ for a while, and have (or at least had) a fall
| back mechanism to present the version as 99.xxx where the xxx
| contains additional information with the true browser version.
| There's also a longer term plan to phase out User-Agent headers
| as they exist now, more details at
| https://blog.chromium.org/2022/03/chrome-100-beta-reduced-us...
| outside1234 wrote:
| Honestly one of the first steps that has to happen when Google is
| broken up is put Chrome in a foundation with open governance.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| That's a lot of memory safety issues. Makes you wonder how many
| would exist if Chromium weren't written in C++.
| colesantiago wrote:
| What would you want Chrome all written in? Rust?
| speedgoose wrote:
| Yes please. And everything should be proved using the Coq
| programming language.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| On that note, has the Rust compiler/runtime ever been
| formally verified?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| A subset of the type system and standard library has
| been, but not the whole thing. It's foundational stuff
| though so that was really great.
| AYoung010 wrote:
| I prefer my web browsers to be written exclusively in
| provably-safe ADA, for maximum security
| 0xCMP wrote:
| iiuc the Chrome team is actively investigating it[0] and
| (again) iiuc recent work with Cxx is paving the way for
| things like that to happen.
|
| [0]: https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/memory-
| safet...
| nanochad wrote:
| DantesKite wrote:
| On a side note, Chrome for iOS is much faster and easier to use
| than Safari, which always cracks me up.
| syspec wrote:
| Chrome for iOS is Safari with a skin on top
| judge2020 wrote:
| The API for loading web pages, yes, so it's not running Blink
| or V8, but people choose to use (or not to use) Chrome
| nowadays for its integration with Google services and sync
| across devices. The only difference is that you don't get the
| wide compatibility Chrome affords via its engine, but IMO
| Apple's control over blocking JIT-compiled code allows them
| to maintain enough global browser marketshare to ensure
| developers at least test against two browser engines and not
| just one.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| Congrats to the Chrome team! In my opinion, easily the most
| important tech project/product in the world. The amount of
| innovation built on top of it is simply mind boggling. We've all
| benefitted from their incredibly hard work.
|
| I look forward to seeing the progress made over the next 100
| versions.
| coolso wrote:
| What a horrible web browser, created by an abhorrent company.
| Safari, Firefox, and Edge should be recommended to our friends
| and family at every opportunity to help counter its market
| dominance.
| ______-_-______ wrote:
| Tell us how you really feel
| Markoff wrote:
| last time I checked Edge was running in chromium as well
|
| and if you wanna do yourself service use Vivaldi instead Edge
| TIPSIO wrote:
| Congrats to the Chrome team! Obviously with market dominance will
| come a lot of criticism (some very much deserved) but you don't
| get there unless you made something truly awesome for people. I
| remember the outrage for the forced / auto-updates and am so
| thankful for their insanely aggressive installer today.
|
| One small non-dev nitpick recently... I am a fan of keeping
| things "zen" or slim for productivity. Basically annoyingly
| hyper-focused on only having essentials. Today though, my Chrome
| browser is a mess of things I can't get rid of on my window:
|
| - Share Icon
|
| - Star Icon
|
| - Extensions/Jigsaw Icon
|
| - Reading List / Bookmarks Icon (new?)
|
| - Profile Icon
|
| - Tab arrow icon
|
| - More icon
|
| Less is sometimes more! I miss the minimalism. At least let me
| remove. Disgusting pic below:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/CHVLaXQ
| Andrex wrote:
| I find the small, label-less, monochrome icons undistracting,
| personally. If they tack on a few more I might start grousing,
| though.
|
| On the other hand, for some reason I cannot get myself over
| Firefox's default UI cruft in comparison.
| easrng wrote:
| Firefox has a way to remove the icons though. (Right click,
| customize toolbar, drag off what you don't want)
| jeffgreco wrote:
| You just inspired me to dig through the flags -- at least the
| side panel is removable.
|
| chrome://flags/#side-panel
| Aardwolf wrote:
| It'd be useful if this side panel could be at top or bottom
| instead. I usually have two chrome windows side by side (left
| and right of the screen), so they're more vertical than
| horizontal
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| It's always baffled me that Chrome lacked toolbar customization
| entirely, even in the early days back when such a feature was
| practically a given in any serious desktop software, and
| standard across several different platforms (Mac/Cocoa, Win32,
| Qt).
|
| It's such a cheap feature to add and maintain and has
| practically zero overhead for less technically inclined users.
| Really strange that Chrome doesn't have it.
| hparadiz wrote:
| Really wish they'd bring back being able to edit shortcut keys
| yourself. I end up having to compile my own version so that I can
| have the shortcuts I want.
|
| https://github.com/ungoogled-software/contrib/blob/master/tw...
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Under macOS at least you can set custom key shortcuts for any
| function in any app that has a corresponding menu item under
| System Preferences > Keyboards > Shortcuts.
|
| Really wish other OSes had a similar feature, though it'd be
| more hit or miss there due to how often standard menubars are
| eschewed under Windows and Linux.
| ffritz wrote:
| Anyone noticed, how Google Meet screen sharing on macOS is broken
| on a daily basis? I then always check for an update and then
| after a restart of chrome, it works again. Next day, it has some
| weird issue again.
|
| But boy is it annoying. I wonder if it is an Apple Silicon only
| issue.
| zaphod12 wrote:
| I think this may be a somewhat more specific to your
| environment...I'm running on a new generation macbook pro (so
| M1+) and haven't had any trouble screen sharing
| Kiro wrote:
| No, this is definitely a much more widespread issue than
| that. Every single person that has tried to screenshare in my
| Google Meet meetings the past week has experienced the same
| problem.
| dudus wrote:
| Same issue here on Intel MacBook Pro 2020.
|
| It seems the OSX permissions for Chrome Screenshare, Mic and
| Video get reset quite frequently. I can't pinpoint exactly what
| triggers it. If it's a Chrome update or OSX update.
|
| EDIT: Just updated Chrome to 100 and sure enough it lost screen
| recording permissions. Camera and Mic were kept though.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| If I had to guess it probably has to do with how Chrome
| updates itself, which is likely causing the OS to see it as a
| new binary that hasn't had permissions set after each update.
| smm11 wrote:
| I've switched to Edge.
|
| So, yeah.
| nabaraz wrote:
| I'd switch too but that bloated right click menu gives me
| scares.
| userbinator wrote:
| If version numbers were still sane, this would probably be closer
| to 10.0.
| spicybright wrote:
| They are completely sane. It's just not what you're used to.
| kibwen wrote:
| Version numbers haven't really ever been meaningful.
| Calendrical versioning is pretty reasonable, and Semver at
| least makes an effort to give meaning to the version number.
| But for nearly all software throughout nearly all of computer
| history, version numbers have been utterly arbitrary. By that
| metric, I see no reason why 100.0 is any more ridiculous than
| 10.0.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I think you're both wrong!
|
| Parent is wrong that Chrome would benefit from semver, and I
| believe you are wrong that semver is meaningless.
|
| Semver is useful for the kinds of tooling that need minimal
| marketing, have other software designed against it, and have
| multiple levels of improvement going on.
|
| Some software which are developed against benefit greatly
| from a x.y.z to let other developers know what class of
| change has been made.
|
| Web browsers and operating systems do not benefit in the same
| way, because they are a different class of software.
| kibwen wrote:
| You may have misunderstood my comment, as I said that
| Semver does attempt to make the number meaningful. Though I
| am not asserting that, on its own, it is very meaningful;
| it relies on users to define what a "breaking change"
| actually means, and it leaves it up to third-party tools to
| enforce any semblance of it. Meanwhile, Semver fails to say
| anything at all about useful concepts like version ranges.
| Ultimately, I like Semver! But it's the bare minimum of
| what it means to have meaningful version numbers, and
| anyone looking to make them truly meaningful has a lot of
| work to do. Still better that what we had before, of
| course.
| superkuh wrote:
| Version numbers of commercial software, or software competing
| intentionally with commercial software grow rapidly until they
| become cumbersome for the users to remember and interact with.
| 100+ is definitely getting there. I imagine a rebranding will
| come soon with some "Chrome Plus version 1" and a restart. FF
| will, of course, follow.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| It's not like you can use SemVer on a browser. Too many changes
| would make it hard to decide whether things are breaking or
| not. And due to backwards compatibility, it's possible that
| we'd actually be on 3.100.0 or whatever. It's a lot easier to
| just bump the major every 6 weeks with releases.
|
| Is it the best idea? Probably not, but it's something simple
| that works and is consistent.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Chrome _does_ have an API - Selenium uses it. And selenium 's
| chrome driver has strict rules about which Chrome versions it
| supports as it is versioned. So actually Chrome's rapid
| versioning does reflect the pace of changes to their API.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| But is Selenium's requirements due to breaking changes
| actually existing? Or just a lack of effort to test
| multiple versions?
| kimixa wrote:
| Arguably with SemVer as html 1.0 pages still work with no
| compatibility issues, it will still be 1.x if that is the
| gate for "breaking" changes.
|
| The other way, if you rely on experimental features, it's
| likely you'll be breaking something every release, ending up
| with effectively a different major version every release -
| which is arguably pretty much what we have now.
|
| The issue is that for a sufficiently complex environment, the
| definition of a "Breaking" api change depends on what you use
| - it's pretty hard to end up making any changes that don't
| have some visibility across the API after all, even internal
| details end up leaking.
| asddubs wrote:
| what ever happened to the plan for chrome to get its own
| certificate store, anyway? It was announced a while back but
| never happened
|
| feels like it would be a good thing especially for old android
| devices (although at least one can use firefox which does have
| its own store)
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